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Bridging the IBM Z skills gaps in early-tenure professionals
Over 100 new and early-tenure professionals joined the IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) Organization in the past 2 years to manage the IBM Z® environment. Therefore, the CIO Organization looked for ways to facilitate their onboarding process and foster a supportive learning culture for new users to work independently in day-to-day business tasks.
Also, considering that 67 of the Fortune 100 companies leverage the mainframe as their core platform, the CIO Organization saw an opportunity to expand its learning grounds. The goal was for IBM Z professionals to build their confidence and autonomy, without much dependence on Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), allowing them to focus on more strategic work.
Additionally, while working at the CIO Organization, these professionals could develop in-demand mainframe skills before they take roles in IBM Technology Expert Labs or client-facing positions through the corporate rotation program. This program aims to help participants acquire the skills that are sought after by employers.
Transforming learning curves into support structures with a gen AI assistant augmented with automation
The CIO Organization used IBM® watsonx Assistant™ for Z, a generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) assistant, to help bridge the skills gap to manage the IBM Z environment. The gen AI assistant is augmented with curated content which is grounded in IBM Z-specific knowledge and best practices.
The organization collaborated with the IBM product team to understand and explore how to use gen AI to transform the way enterprise users, with varying experience levels, interact with IBM Z. Through a series of brainstorming sessions, both teams prioritized 3 of 35 use cases for initial adoption and deployed watsonx Assistant for Z on-premises on an existing Red Hat® OpenShift® cluster.
As part of the partnership with the product team, the CIO Organization provided feedback to the watsonx Assistant for Z team to enhance product features and capabilities based on implementation findings and results.
The details of the watsonx Assistant for Z implementation are best showcased in these initial 3 use cases (more to come as new use cases are rollout this year):
- IBM Z questions and answers (Q&A) support for operations staff
- Before: IBM Z operations staff asked SMEs questions with answers that can be found in product-related documentation.
- After: watsonx Assistant for Z provides digestible and actionable answers with links to learn more, allowing the SMEs to focus on more strategic work.
- Incident analysis
- Before: IBM Z support team manually searched through past incidents for similar issues and their resolutions.
- After: watsonx Assistant for Z ingests the incident from a third-party workflow automation platform, analyzes the problem and presents suggested courses of action based on product documentation and previous incident analysis on similar systems.
- Patching IBM Db2 subsystems
- Before: IBM Z operations staff manually entered multiple pieces of information into a form to open a change request, receive multiple approvals, trigger automation, back-out if failed and close change request.
- After: IBM Z operations staff tell watsonx Assistant for Z that a system needs a patch. It then retrieves details from a third-party workflow automation platform and looks up relevant automation in Ansible®. After the staff specifies when to apply the patching, the gen AI assistant opens a standard change request, sends relevant details to trigger automation, prompts additional automation on failure, and automatically closes the change request with the correct status. Lastly, the staff confirms the patching was applied.
There are 2 main reasons why the CIO Organization chose watsonx Assistant for Z:
- IBM watsonx Assistant for Z not only puts decades of mainframe experience and best practices at the team's fingertips, providing answers to their queries, but also offer authorized users an option to trigger automation to perform tasks.
- The model used by IBM watsonx Assistant for Z addresses a common cause of potential hallucinations by leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture to generate responses from only the ingested contents.
Faster onboarding, simplified operational experience and improved productivity of experienced mainframe users
The CIO Organization uses generative AI to transform the way early-tenure professionals engage with and manage the IBM Z environment. Overall, 300+ users are using watsonx Assistant for Z to find answers to product-related questions and incident management procedures.
According to internal estimates and data retained by IBM, watsonx Assistant for Z helped the CIO Organization to achieve:
- 8% reduction in new and early-tenure professionals learning time when looking for answers to questions related to IBM Z1
- 10% faster resolution of incidents by using RAG to search and suggest possible solutions2
- 50% decrease in time to patch Db2 systems by incorporating automation in the change request process3
1 Based on internal records, including data manually gathered before automation was implemented and digital learning platform reports
2 These incidents are managed in a third-party workflow automation platform used for IT services, including incident management.
3 Based on Db2 dashboard and third-party workflow automation platform reports.
The IBM Chief Information Officer (CIO) Organization leads IBM’s internal IT strategy. The organization is responsible for delivering, securing, modernizing and supporting the IT solutions that IBM employees, clients and partners use to do their jobs every day. The CIO Organization’s strategy encompasses an adaptive IT platform that makes IT tools, applications and systems easier to access across the enterprise, accelerates problem-solving and serves as an innovation engine for IBM, catalyzing business growth.
Citations
¹ Reference: https://www.ibm.com/topics/mainframe
² Based on internal records, including data manually gathered before automation was implemented and digital learning platform reports.
³ These incidents are managed in a third-party workflow automation platform used for IT services.
⁴ Based on Db2 dashboard and third-party workflow automation platform reports.
Legal
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2024. IBM, the IBM logo, Db2, watsonx Assistant for Z, and IBM Z are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corp., in the U.S. and/or other countries. This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.
Client examples are presented as illustrations of how those clients have used IBM products and the results they may have achieved. Actual performance, cost, savings or other results in other operating environments may vary.
Red Hat®, OpenShift®, and Ansible® are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, Inc. or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.