Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Gene Kim: All right. I met our next speaker, Rosalind Radcliffe from IBM, in 2014. But it was later in 2015 when I, like almost everyone else who was there at that conference, was blown away when she presented on how modern technical practices could be done on the z/OS mainframe platform. Things like Git, continuous test and integration, and so forth.

Jeff Gallimore summed it up so well at the time when he said it showed us that mainframe people were not people to avoid, but they are software engineers just like us.

Her technical innovation and evangelism led to her elevation from being a Distinguished Engineer to a Technical Fellow, which is the highest rank of individual contributors at IBM, of which there are only 84 right now. This is an incredibly accomplished group of people. Among that population there are five Nobel Prize winners, as well as five ACM Turing Award winners.

While becoming one of those Technical Fellows is remarkable on its own, what is even more remarkable to me is that Rosalind is the first Technical Fellow to be made in the finance and operations division as opposed to R&D.

The reason is that Rosalind's current remit is to execute an internal two-year transformation that absolutely must succeed. This is like one of those deadlines where the consequences of not meeting it would be seriously grave, almost unspeakable consequences.

Among the programming committee, we are so excited that Rosalind is going to share the story because she is going to talk about her journey ascending to the very top of the individual-contributor career ladder, why having the IC ladder is so important, and how as an individual contributor she is helping execute such an important project for IBM. Here is Rosalind.

Rosalind Radcliffe

Rosalind Radcliffe: Thank you, Gene. I am very glad to be here again at the conference in person. I really love this in person, so let us enjoy this opportunity to talk and collaborate together.

Here I am going to talk about my role as an executive individual contributor as part of this major transformation. Thank you, Gene, for the introduction, and the reminder that I sit among people who got Nobel prizes and Turing Award winners. And no, I am not one of those.

I got to be an IBM Fellow through a wonderful straight path. Yeah, okay, no career path is a straight path. I got to IBM Fellow by making z/OS DevOps-able, as I say, really transforming the mainframe environment to demonstrate that it really could be DevOps, that you really could use DevOps practices, and there is absolutely no reason you cannot be deploying multiple times a day even if you are in COBOL on a mainframe.

Okay, I have done that. I was looking for my next challenge. The thing about Fellow is you have to have a role that requires a Fellow, because when you are appointed Fellow, you are appointed for the work that you have done, but in recognition of the work you are going to do as a Fellow. So you do not just get to sit on your laurels. It is time to work again.

I actually came into the F&O organization under our CIO, responsible for our DevSecOps transformation. That is big enough. The CIO organization, I am going to explain, is a very large organization. That was big enough. Then came this challenge of making sure we completed the transformation, which I will talk about. And so I got to be Fellow and was told, you will be successful, go have fun, and make it happen.

I am going to talk about what that challenge is and how I, as an individual contributor, really am helping make this transformation successful.

Just to be clear, what is my challenge? I keep saying it is a challenge. Well, let us see. We are going from 11 data centers to four. We are going from thousands of individually managed systems, including hundreds of individually managed z LPARs, into a standardized environment. And by the way, you have to build an entirely new team at the same time. You have to hire an entirely new staff to do this. You cannot use the people you have.

If you have heard this little problem that says maybe mainframe skills are hard to find, well guess what? Sorry, you still have to build a new staff. This was the challenge that I walked into.

I knew I was taking on a large challenge because the CIO organization is large. We in the CIO organization run IBM's internal IT, so it is not small. We might have about 6,000 developers in the organization. We run SAP, we run Salesforce, we run Adobe, we run ServiceNow. We run a set of services or work with a set of services in cloud providers.

But we also run a finance organization because we provide IBM Financing, so we have to meet all the banking regulations. Is that not fun? And we run manufacturing. We have to run our supply chain, we have to make sure we can get parts delivered, all of the things that come with a manufacturing organization.

We have 250,000 employees, and they are in over a hundred countries around the world. We have legal and business in well over a hundred countries, which means we have to deal with tax regulations and benefits in all of those countries.

We have a very large IT landscape to manage, and at the same time we have to transform, move, modernize, and build a new team. Have fun.

Most recently, we actually got an additional challenge: reduce the number of tools you have got, remove things you do not need, and remove duplication.

One of the other things that we had done was start this developer experience team as part of coming in for this DevSecOps transformation. We do have a developer experience team, and they provide pipeline capability to the CIO's organization. But we also provide the largest enterprise GitHub server on the planet internally, with way too many repositories. We have to provide that support to IBM.

We provide multiple different tools for pipelines and for testing to the organization. Along with this challenge, the new challenge is also reduce the complexity, make it easier for developers, bring more standardization. So we are also reducing that challenge, removing tools. What do you think developers think about that? We are having to make it simpler and easier for them to use the tools and processes without having them get angry.

What we did when I came in and got this additional challenge was look at our goal. We want to be a showcase for hybrid cloud. We want to demonstrate true hybrid cloud. We will run our own on-prem environments. We have the four data centers. We will use IBM Cloud. We will use SaaS services. But we want to demonstrate how this can really be done in the best way.

We want to do it in a way that makes it easy for our developers not to have to think. We have created a pipeline and are building intelligent workload placement into the pipeline so that the developers do not actually choose where their applications are going to run. That gets decided by the pipeline.

If I happen to have capacity on prem, it is going to run on prem. If I run out of capacity on prem, I will run it somewhere else. This lets me choose. If I have capacity on my Z box, I am going to run it there because why not? It can run there. I build multi-arch images, and I can do that.

We do have a basic OpenShift environment as our platform for non-Z, non-z/OS. We use Z for OpenShift as well. But for our z/OS environment, obviously that is not OpenShift.

In our z/OS environment, I still want to have a standards-based environment. I still want to have the same kind of automation and build this in a consistent way, so developers do not have to think there either. They build their code, the pipeline picks it up and delivers it into the environment, and they can do what they need to do effectively and efficiently.

In order to do this, we really needed to build up a team that really understands modern ways of working. Okay, I have a challenge. I have to build a team. What do I do? I might have worked in the industry for a few years. I might go find people I know. And so I did.

I went out and found, well, what am I going to find? Retirees or people about to retire because they know Z really well. But I found people who wanted to change. I found people who were willing to think about Z and the entire environment in a new way, modern ways of working.

We built up z/OS build automation. I can build a z/OS image with a Tekton pipeline using Python. Just like you can use a Tekton pipeline to build any other container, I can build the entire system image that way. We are building up our pipeline so that we can do all this automation.

Now, I did not find a full team of retirees. Nowhere near. What I did was find a few key skills, and then hire in people with various skill levels, and we are training them. But when we are doing automation with Python, what do I need to find? I need to find somebody who knows Python. How hard is that? That is pretty easy. I can find people who want to do Python, who can work in our environment, and we can give them the knowledge necessary to work on z/OS.

We are really working toward this zero-touch operations environment. One of the challenges is today we have to move data centers. We do not have a choice. What are we going to do? We do not have a choice. We are going to lift and shift. We are going to take what we have to and move it into the new environment, but at the same time we are going to build out this new world so I can slip and slide applications into the new world. Yes, that is a cute term.

This is a large challenge, and the team always runs across things like, you cannot do that, or no, you cannot get access to that system. I love that one.

One of the advantages of being in the role I am in is my team uses me as a hammer. They call me the big hammer. What I do when they have a challenge is send a note. Sometimes it is a simple note: what is the problem? For some miraculous reason, the problem goes away. It is an advantage.

By being an IBM Fellow, by being an individual contributor, and by understanding what we are trying to build, I can lead my team so they understand the technical direction. They understand what I am trying to build. What is this goal? How do we want to showcase and do the best we can do? We can take advantage of the systems, and I can help direct the team for that.

But I did not do any of the hiring. I may have found people to hire. I did not have to go through the process of doing the interviews and doing the paper processes. Managers had to do that. I got the fun part. I got to work with the people to help them understand what our goals were. I got to work with the teams to help them understand the strategy.

I get to work across the organization to make sure we are designing this true zero-touch environment with all the security built in from the beginning. If my COBOL, my PL/I code, goes through the same pipeline as anything else in our environment, I can do the same security kind of scanning, I can do the same security checking, appropriate for the language obviously. I can do that in the same way, so developers have a consistent experience for the way they are working.

We can put in pervasive encryption so that we can ensure we are secure from the very beginning. We can do things with our modernization, such as provide database as a service, and we can provide that on multiple platforms. I could get it at IBM Cloud. I can get it on my z/OS. I could get it on any one of the other systems in the environment. This allows the developers to get access to the capabilities they need without having to think about it.

Do I need a highly available z/OS environment? Do I need a highly available database? One of the fun challenges when you live in a regulated industry is all of the, I have to do DR testing, I have to do all of these kinds of things. I do not like DR testing. I will just admit it. I am going to solve the problem a different way. I am going to flip every six months.

I am literally going to flip my workload every six months so I do not have to ever do DR testing. I do not want to do DR testing. I am going to flip my workload. I can do that because we are designing the system in a standards-based way with automation, using system capabilities so that we can provide this capability to the business.

The other thing that was really important about this transformation in the mainframe world is I am converting all my system programmers to be SREs. Okay, they do not even know what the term is in some cases, so this has been fun.

In SRE, really and truly, that is your job. You are managing the infrastructure in a way using the pipeline. You are doing automated development. My pipeline has to have tests in it just like any other environment. From a standpoint of building infrastructure as code, we are doing it in exactly the same way to make sure it is consistent, and make sure that whether or not somebody decides next week they want to work on the distributed side, or someone from the distributed side decides they want to start working on the Z side, it does not matter. They can move between the parts of the organization to provide the support.

One of the advantages we have in doing this work is we really can be client zero. Client zero is a special ability since IBM builds the hardware. I cannot right now because I have to exit the data center, so I do not get this choice right now. But as soon as I do that, I am going to get new hardware so I can play with the next generation. I can play early, get access to things early, and demonstrate the value of systems.

Right now I am looking forward to my z16 so I can play with a Telum processor and additional AI processing. I have that option, so I can showcase and demonstrate what the best is.

As an architect, and as someone who gets to focus on technology, I get to look at the future and design this system not for the next quarters, but we are designing this replacement system for the next decades so that it is ready for any transition that comes with quantum, because we all know that is coming, with AI because it is already here, sort of. With all of these challenges, we are making sure we have designed our system so that it really provides this value.

On that first chart, it said my deadline was fourth quarter 2023. Yes, that is true. I am near the end of this journey, and in a few months I will be happy to say I am done. We are moving on to the next part of continuous modernization.

This is a real challenge. I will say I would not recommend doing all three of these at once. If you are going to modernize, modernize, but do not try to move data centers and replace your entire team at the same time. It is just not a good idea. But we are doing it.

We are doing it by using technical leadership, by focusing on making sure we are growing our skills, growing our people, and we have an open and dynamic operating model.

What is the help I need? Well, it is not necessarily help I need, but it is help the industry needs. We need to make sure we recognize that there are people like me who would not make a good manager. Really, no. But who can lead teams, who can be technical leaders. By giving me the opportunity to do that, and by giving the individuals in your companies the opportunity to do this, you win. You get a lot of value out of this.

We need to grow new-collar talent. We need to look at diversity. Anytime I get on the stage, I get to talk about diversity. Sorry. It is important. Diversity is important in all forms in our organizations because having diverse backgrounds helps us be different. It helps us all move to different ways.

The last one: if you remember my career journey, it was a snake. I did lots of transformations. I did lots of different lateral moves. It is really important to do rotation within a company to continuously challenge, to make sure people are continuously learning and evolving and developing.

I would challenge everyone to think about what your career journey is, how you are doing your career journey, and how you are supporting your organization's career journeys. We do need to provide this journey for everyone.

I have been at IBM 35, almost 36 years. I have not been in one job. I have had more jobs than I could have had in any other company. That variety has kept me going. You can tell by my latest challenge, I am always up for a challenge. Challenges are fun. They make you grow and they make you learn. We all need to do this to grow the industry and ensure we have the people working in the industry to keep going for the next whatever, so I can retire someday. Thank you. Much appreciate the time.