CICS and MQ Expert
Location: Remote
Duration: 36-months
The CICS and MQ (transaction server and messaging) resource will provide installation, configuration, upgrades, maintenance, and management for the CICS and MQ systems.
This resource provides management for several interfaces that make transaction processing services available to a variety of internal and external systems and they design, code, and maintain new applications, services, and custom tools and utilities to run on the mainframe.
- Work closely with application teams on the introduction and management of new workloads on the system, such as batch jobs and online transaction processing including application and integration programs, transactions, tasks, and webservices.
- Proactively manages system capacity and workload prioritization and works closely with the application support teams when there are production issues that need to be addressed.
- Provide deep subject matter expertise to various groups for how things can integrate with the mainframe, assisting with solution design, implementation, and problem resolution.
- Support critical business activities such as electric outage reporting, outage status, meter changes, billing, payment processing, customer requests and inquiries, and bank payments.
There are several technologies that interface with the mainframe (Please include evaluation in the submission and highlight experience in the summary)
- DB2 Connect for database access,
- Oracle SOA for interfacing between customer systems and the mainframe,
- MQ Series message queues for guaranteed delivery of the transactions,
- Biztalk interfaces, and Secure FTP.
Support the interface for each of these on the mainframe. The distributed teams supported only have visibility into their specific code or systems and therefore work with this mainframe resource to follow the transaction flow end-to-end which is essential for us to ‘keep the lights on’ in support of Southern Company systems.
Transaction Servers, Messaging & Interfaces Roles and Responsibilities
- Perform the installation and configuration for CICS and MQ upgrades to agreed levels.
- Coordinate and/or perform maintenance of CICS and MQ software.
- Support agreed upon application and user test windows
- Apply maintenance to correct outstanding incidents.
- Assist automation groups efforts to increase system availability, to facilitate system monitoring, and to minimize manual procedures.
- Apply application-required configuration changes.
- Provide product end-of-support dates, new product release features, and general availability.
- Coordinate the installation of necessary permanent fixes, patches and maintenance.
- Configure CICS and MQ subsystems and system resources.
- Identify and resolve CICS and MQ software problems.
- Escalate problems to CICS and MQ software vendors and track to resolution, if necessary.
- Perform RCAs in the event of CICS and MQ outages.
- Perform MQ software product log file rotation, pruning, and archiving.
- Identify middleware software file and data sources and filesystems to be backed up during operating system and subsystem backups.
- Coordinate MQ system software level recovery.
- Conduct security compliance activities in accordance with agreed upon security requirements.
- Maintain MQ operations delivery procedures.
- Define and maintain MQ application objects, including SSL parameters, as requested.
- Configure WMQ subsystem and system resources.
- Provide interface management for transaction processing services designing coding applications, services and custom tools and utilities.
- Perform CICS and MQ consultation with applicating and distributed server teams.