Thoroughly Modern Archives

Thoroughly Modern: Top Five Reasons To Go Paperless With IBM i Forms

June 8, 2020 Stephen Flaherty

(Sponsored Content) As offices closed and employees began working from home earlier this year, a significant challenge arose for companies that rely on printed spool files and IBM i documents. If employees were not in the office with access to a printer, how would they get checks, invoices and other documents to the people who need them? IT departments were already scrambling to enable employees to work remotely, and suddenly they were faced with the urgent need to electronically distribute documents.

A lot of organizations weren’t prepared to change the way they do business overnight and much of …
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Thoroughly Modern: Quick Digital Transformation Wins With Web And Mobile IBM i Apps

May 27, 2020 Kevin Cronin

The future of IT no longer involves hiding in the basement and pushing buttons. In today’s digital economy, the role of IT – and IBM i – is critical. Internal users and customers are demanding modern, intuitive applications that are easy to access. If you’re an IT leader, you’re likely meeting with business stakeholders, discussing how you can grow and improve your business, and looking at what’s available to satisfy those needs.

As my colleagues have discussed in previous installments of this column, failing to innovate in your market could put your business at risk. Digital disruption is happening …
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Thoroughly Modern: Digital Modernization, But Not At Any Cost

May 11, 2020 Daniel Crépeau

(Sponsored Content) There is a lot of discussion around digital transformation, and for good reason: Digital companies are typically 26 percent more profitable than those that don’t have digitized and transformation management capability. However, according to a recent study conducted by Harvard Business Review, even though businesses spent $1.3 trillion on digital transformation last year, 70 percent of those investments went to waste.

Organizations don’t have the resources or budget to take on large-scale transformation projects that are doomed to fail. In most cases, resources are limited even though the very future of these companies depends on …
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Thoroughly Modern: Digital Transformation Is More Important Than Ever

April 15, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) There are very few things in life that don’t have some kind of distribution across behavior patterns. Some phenomena are driven by bell curves or inverted bell curves or some other kind of distribution – including random. And as such, we all know that the companies that comprise the IBM i base fall on different parts of the spectrum of behavior with regard to how up to date their systems and their applications are.

In normal markets, where some of the pressures are not so intense, it might not matter as much to have a modern …
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Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten …
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Thoroughly Modern: Resizing Application Fields Presents Big Challenges

February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) It sounds so simple. You need to change the size of one or more fields in one or more applications. How hard can that be? Quite time consuming and labor intensive, as it turns out, if you don’t do it right. To get a sense of the issues that companies face as they tweak the fields in their applications, we sat down with Ray Everhart, a product manager at Fresche Solutions, who knows a thing or two about this issue after many decades in the field.

Timothy Prickett Morgan: Can you tell us a little bit …
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Thoroughly Modern: Taking The Pulse Of IBM i Developers

January 22, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) It takes someone who has experience in application development to create and sell tools that help make a developer’s job easier. We think about the tool creators, but when it comes to getting people to adopt a new technology, the technical sales team at any software company is the bridge that connects developers of tools to the developer of applications who can be helped by those tools. In this edition of Thoroughly Modern, we are talking with Stephen Flaherty, a technical engineer at Fresche Solutions, about what IBM i developers are thinking about and doing …
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Thoroughly Modern: More Than Just A Pretty Face

December 9, 2019 Greg Patterson and Mike Pavlak

(Sponsored Content) The most difficult, thorny, and intractable problems can sometimes be effectively addressed, if not outright fixed, by breaking them down into smaller problems that can be addressed tactically while also hewing to a broader and deeper strategic plan.

That, in a nutshell, is the issue facing most IBM i shops that have not done much application modernization above and beyond pushing the display part of the code to a 5250 green screen emulator or maybe doing a little screen scraping to gussy it up a little bit. The reality is there are still an awful lot …
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Thoroughly Modern: Driving Your Synon Applications Forward

November 25, 2019 Chris Koppe

(Sponsored Content) CA 2E, formerly known Synon and still called that by many, is a highly specialized programming language and a productive 4GL development environment. Used by a small number of IBM i shops, Synon has enabled organizations to rapidly create complex applications and systems that run the core of their business operations. These applications are often homegrown and serve as the backbone of business processing while providing organizations with differentiation against their competition.

Although Synon applications provide great value, they are inherently difficult to access and share information with the organization. In many cases, these operations ecosystems …
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Thoroughly Modern: What To Pack For The Digital Transformation Journey

October 16, 2019 Emmanuel Tzinevrakis

Welcome to a new column called Thoroughly Modern. The name is meant to convey the idea that we need to define the desired – if ever-evolving – end state of our businesses and the people, processes, and programs that encapsulate how everything works when we get there.

It is a given that everyone understands that digital transformation is sweeping every industry, with incumbents being challenged by upstarts – and each other – as they try to create new and better ways to provide products and services to customers in a modern, digital world. We accept this as a first …
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