Never thought about any of that. Since COVID this client has a lot more remote workers (as a contract worker I've been remote for the last decade and a bit more); does that imply anything? Probably not; Backhoe Bob would mess something up on the grounds of the HQ itself, and if he brought the mainframe down it would affect everyone whether or not they're on-site. Anyway, it hasn't happened since they hired me in 2019.
Active vs idle: There are certainly folks who spend most of their time on the mainframe, right? The IT people of course: developers, sysprogs, operations, the security admins. But in an insurance company I would think the adjustors and many of the financial folks would spend lots of time on the mainframe too. And there are special agencies that are actually run by in-house folks to support the independents, answering questions and addressing problems; they probably stay pretty busy. But about the actual agents out there I know less. They do connect to the mainframe using individual IDs, but what they see is a GUI front end that hits up CICS for the information it presents to them in a friendlier format; that implies to me that all the mainframe sees is a half-second interaction for each inquiry, and I'll bet an agent spends most of his time on the phone and only a few minutes at a time looking things up. --- Bob Bridges, [email protected], cell 336 382-7313 /* When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -Arthur C Clarke's 1st law. */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of Grant Taylor Sent: Monday, August 14, 2023 13:45 If you can, please elaborate if those users can function for most of their job if the mainframe is inaccessible due to Backhoe Bob chewing on WAN connections again? Do you have any idea how many of those are /active/ vs /idle/ logged in users? --- On 8/14/23 9:55 AM, Bob Bridges wrote: > Currently I have an insurance company as my main client; in-house > there are about 220 managers who review access, with let's guess an > average of five mainframe reports each. They also have about 400 > independent agents that use a system that ultimately connects them to > the mainframe, and each of those may have one or two assistants with > their own IDs. That's probably typical for an insurance company. > I couldn't guess about how many might be logged on at once. Oh, sure > I could, but it's just a guess: If there are 2000 mainframe IDs, > maybe 500 at a time? Purest guess. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
