This article is the second in a four-part series. In the next two months, the authors will look more closely at how CICS TS v4.1 will enable organizations to comply with regulatory requirements and control costs and processes.

New capabilities in CICS TS v4.1 will help your organization better compete in today’s marketplace. In this article, we will use a common business scenario to illustrate how CICS gives you new ways to build your company’s competitive advantage.

CICS Situational Applications

“An application is for life, not just for Christmas” is the mantra in most CICS shops, or at least it used to be. The application life-cycle processes, from requirements gathering, design, and development to quality management and eventual deployment, are designed to ensure that only the most strategic applications with the largest user base—the ones with the biggest return on investment—make it into production.

This development model typically leaves a very long tail of unsatisfied users whose applications never get built by corporate IT, and who are left to do it on their own. In many cases, the task involves not only building or acquiring new applications, but often rebuilding applications which already exist because they can’t integrate with them, or don’t want IT to know what they are doing. This can result in shadow IT development with its own challenges – potential security issues, governance, and duplication. Sound familiar?

Technologies introduced in CICS TS v4.1, such as business events and Atom feeds, give these kinds of users the opportunity to bypass long development cycles and create new situational applications that respond with speed and agility to fast-evolving business situations.

Let’s imagine a scenario. It’s early December and you are the IT manager for a consumer electronics company. The Marketing VP comes in to tell you that he is rolling out a seasonal campaign for the upcoming holidays, and he needs your help to make sure his limited advertising budget hits the right targets. He wants to see where the new customers are located so that he can fine-tune his advertising. It’s a simple enough request, but you know that the process means that he wouldn’t get his new report until well after the holidays are over. But if you turn him away, he’ll get one of his own people to build an application using sneaker-net file transfer and Visual Basic.

This is where CICS TS V4.1 comes in. Using its non-invasive business event and Atom feed technologies; you can give deliver the data the Marketing VP needs – all without changing any applications or experiencing the associated process delay. Some simple configuration steps will produce a real-time feed of ZIP codes that can either be viewed in a feed reader or mash-up quickly with a Google map. Such a situational application can deliver the insight that the Marketing VP needs to maximize the advertising budget without adding significant burden to your IT department.

Under the Covers

So, how’s that all done? Is it really that easy? The following five-step process will show you how.

1. Add an Event. The facilities to emit events from CICS applications are very flexible, and feeding a mashup via Atom is only one of its capabilities. This time we will use CICS Temporary Storage as the medium to hold the event data on its way to the mashup, but you can also send the events via WebSphere MQ. The CICS Explorer provides an Event Binding Editor that allows your application analyst to quickly create the information required by CICS to identify when a new customer registers, collect the ZIP code that the application is already capturing, and place that event in a specified temporary storage queue. This information is packaged together into a bundle resource for deployment to CICS.

2. Add a New Atom Feed. Atom-enabling this new stream of events will make them available to a wide range of consumers as a feed. Atom feeds are based on HTTP, so you need to enable TCP/IP access to CICS and define a CICS TCPIPService resource so that CICS will listen for Atom requests on a new URL of your choice. The CICS URIMap resource is used to instruct CICS to handle the Atom protocol.

3. Link Event to Atom Feed. The business content of the new Atom feed will be formatted as XML data by associating the binary data format on the Temporary Storage queue with a Bindfile which tells CICS how to transform the data to XML. A new tool included with CICS TS and integrated into Rational Developer for System z creates this Bindfile to match the copybook for the event data.

4. Link Reader to Atom Feed. Most, if not all, mashup tools naturally consume Atom feeds, so now it is simply a matter of pointing them at the new URL to discover the stream of events containing your new customer's ZIP codes.

5. Create Mashup Linking ZIP Code to Google Map. These may then be used to place markers on a map sourced from a provider such as Google Maps.

Note that feeds, bindfiles, and bundles are new resource types in CICS TS V4.1.

More Complex Scenarios

While feed readers like RSSOwl or Google Reader meet the most basic needs with close to zero effort, often the data display requirements go beyond their capabilities. In such cases, events can be routed to a business intelligence system such as IBM WebSphere Business Monitor (WBM) to create a business dashboard. In our scenario, such a dashboard might show numbers of new customers by advertising region, along with associated revenue, maybe broken down by product type, with time-series analysis comparing current sales with previous months or years.

Sometimes events need to be seen in the context of other events. Let’s say your company makes audio equipment, and your sales VP wants to know how many customers buy both a digital recorder and a microphone within a 30 day period, so it can determined whether there would be value in creating a package deal. Using a product like WebSphere Business Events (WBE), it would be easy to create a set of rules to detect such event patterns, and either display their results using its integrated dashboard, or feed the results to an external dashboard such as WBM.

Taking this scenario even further, WBE could turn insight into action, by identifying those customers who had not bought a microphone within 30 days, and initiating an automated follow-up process such as sending them an email with details of the microphone range.

The key point to note here is that once the event points in the CICS system have been configured, most of the other activities – building the mashup, defining the dashboard displays, and creating the event patterns – can be done by the business analysts without compromising the integrity or the value of the core CICS applications.

Summary

We hope that this article has shown that CICS Transaction Server for z/OS v4.1 can really give your business community the insight it needs so that your company can compete more effectively, without putting undue load on you and your IT team, enabling you to "do more with less".