March Meeting: Overcoming the Legacy Label

Presented by IBM Champion Alan Seiden

Many CIOs and IT professionals, while appreciating what the IBM i platform does for their organizations, have a slight inferiority complex about the platform, believing that the issues of deferred maintenance and skill replacement are unique to us. They aren't. Any long-lived platform brings similar challenges, to be met head-on with confidence. The grass isn't really greener elsewhere. At this session, you will learn how to talk about the challenges of long-lived systems in a way that that business people can understand, how to create a plan for moving forward with IBM i modernization (or we might say, more precisely, "paying down technical debt"), if appropriate for your business, and to gain support for doing so.

Learning Objectives

• Learn to speak in a way that transcends platform and helps other leaders in your organization see a strong business case - in reduced cost, risk, and stress - for retaining and improving your existing IBM i infrastructure.
• Be able to answer questions about benefits and risks of cloud offerings.
• Understand how to work more effectively with business people who may want to dictate technology to you.

Audience

• CIOs and other leaders with responsibility for IT direction, whether experienced with IBM i or not.
• IBM i professionals who want to communicate development needs to business people in a non-technical way.

Biography

As an IBM Champion and founder of Seiden Group, Alan Seiden and his team mentor CIOs and IBM i development teams on projects that involve integrations or high-performance web and mobile applications using IBM i data and business logic. He co-developed the PHP Toolkit with IBM, was one of the first Zend Framework certified engineers, and a charter member of IBM/COMMON’s PHP Advisory Board. An award-winning speaker, Alan has been called “the performance guru of PHP on IBM i.” Alan’s passion for the IBM i community inspires him to host the CIO Summit twice per year and mentor talented younger developers within the Club Seiden forum.