Hal Merritt writes: >The OP asked how to evaluate and quantify the risks of being >unsupported. The consensus seems to be that the risks are minimal.
If that's the consensus, I'll dissent at least somewhat. If you were to draw a graph with "risk" plotted on the Y axis and "time" plotted on the X axis, roughly speaking you'd see a sudden jump in risk at the point you go unsupported. Clearly there's a difference between being supported and unsupported, so you have a discontinuity in the curve there. Then the curve would typically follow a relatively flat (but increasing) path over time, and the slope would be increasing over time. Risk accelerates with time, in other words. Risk means "total risk" here. There are lots of forms of risk. So that's the general curve. Now, how much that sudden jump is at the initial point is situational. And the slope of the curve (and the acceleration in that slope) is also situational. The OP followed up to say that these are roughly 12 core applications, mostly revenue-related. Accounts receivable is pretty darn critical stuff, so if I absolutely had to choose some application function to go out of support, that would not be it. Peggy Andrews writes: >3) this means no design or procurement of >replacement applications has begun; 4) a statement >has been made to management that the *majority* of >these applications will be off of the >mainframe by the end of the year. 3) and 4) cannot be logically reconciled, of course. (And I love that classic "mistakes were made" political grammar in the second half. :-)) My advice would be to say that "business as usual" maintenance practices should prevail at least until there is a project (i.e. some form of reality). By the way, has anyone bothered to run any real numbers on this exercise? Sometimes city auditors do pretty good work, actually. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
