| I worked at * bank [Australias oldest bank!] within the last 3 years. The entire bank CRM (~12 million active customers) is a Z/OS CICS system which was first installed in about 1972-73. The same goes for all wire transfers, credit card transactions, ATM infrastructure and so on. The banks solution was to simply write about 40 different Javascript and Visual Basic interface apps for staff to use, which are poorly maintained failures, running inside on-premises VPS. If you wanted to access the apps for one of the banks subsidiary banks... you had to open a VPS via remote desktop INSIDE the remote desktop instance of the VPS you were already working on. Where it got really stupid though is they wrote a windows program which emulates the 'green screen' environment. My coworkers in their 50s were using the same IBM commands to update client account details that they learned during training in the 1970s as branch staff. >Does anyone else have any experience updating and rewriting old mainframe batch processes to newer systems and architectures? What we did is... use AutoHotKey to record keystroke macros which are then executed into CICS via a windows emulator. It sounds stupid, but we managed to automate about 50,000 FTE (full time equivalent) of man-hours from our India based back office teams. The MBAs loved that. Of course, this was achieved by using an auto hot key script on an IBM terminal emulator running CICS inside a windows vps running inside a second windows vps, running inside a desktop computer. All written in a mixture of VBS/javascript/AHK |