This enables the I.T. personnel to spend their time focusing on adding to the knowledge base the information only a human being can address. The programmers are wasting their time trying to keep the code and the documentation in sync. Make the computer do it.

There is an old saying:

For want of a nail, the battle was lost....

For want of a nail, a shoe was lost,
    for want of a shoe, a horse was lost,
        for want of a horse, a rider was lost,
            for want of a rider, the battle was lost.

....so for the want of a single nail, the entire battle was lost. 

Small problems can lead to big problems.

Corporations tend not to have accurate up to-date documentation of their production applications. Production problems occur which impact the business's ability to serve the customers needs. Even though the Corporation will have policies and standards which demand that it's systems be fully documented, they rarely are. Getting a firm grip on the situation seems to be impossible no matter how much money and effort is expended.

Production problems don't occur at the Business or Systems Design level, they occur at the Operations level. Jobs fail, programs bomb, data is corrupted.

During a production problem the Programmers and On-call Analysts could care less about the business requirements or how the system was designed.

What they need to know is:

- what job failed
- what programs does it run
- what are the input and output files
- what databases are involved and are they being updated or used as read only
- who else is this going to affect
- has this happened before and if it has, what did they do the last time to fix it.

To maintain this needed information the programmers usually create two forms of documentation:

Manually drawing graphical flowcharts of the production jobstreams.
Manually creating lists of the code components which make up their production system.

These two forms of documentation tend to end up in word processing documents, printed onto paper and stored in 3-ring binders.

And there's the problem. It takes an enormous amount of time and effort to manually dig up all the information and relate the parts to each other, so little time is left to spend on the Business or Systems Design documentation and the application's relationship to other production systems.

And of course, changes are made to the code but the documentation isn't updated, resulting in documentation that is out of date, not in sync with the code, and is no longer trustworthy. The Programmers will often abandon the documentation and return to reading the code itself since it's the only thing they can trust as being correct.

The Solution

The solution is simple. The code components which make up the production application already contain the information about:

What  jobs run.
When  the jobs run.
Where  they execute (which sub-system on which mainframe).
Who  is responsible for the job.
How  the jobs run.

What is needed is to get the system itself to give up that information in a useful form so the Programmers don't have to chase it down.

But there are two things about the production system that the code does not contain that only a human being can address:

Why was this code written?

What does it do from a business point of view.
What is the impact to the Corporation.
How is related to other systems in the Corporation.
What is the impact to the Customer.

and most importantly from a production support point of view....

What do you do when it doesn't work?

What are the exact step by step instructions someone is to take to resolve the problem.

It is these two questions the Programmers should be spending their time answering. This is the real value of their knowledge. If they answer these two questions then the Business Requirements and Systems Design aspects will have been addressed from a production support standpoint.

What has been needed for over the last 40 years of the mainframes existence is a method of extracting the code components from the production system and linking all of these different parts together into a single cohesive knowledge base which is automatically kept in sync so the programmers don't have to do it.