In a hybrid computing world, no application is an island and similarly no system running those applications and the databases underpinning those applications can be an island, either. And yet, many IBM i shops still behave as if they can be islands when it comes to application release management.
Despite this, based on our own experience and the anecdotal evidence we gather from IBM i shops like yours, there is a clear separation between release deployment in the IBM i world and the “other” release deployments in the enterprise. We need to talk about this.
First of all, application deployment is not driven by technology. Release deployment or application release orchestration if you want to call it that, is an enterprise activity. It is strategic, and as such it will involve different teams from within the organization. And so it is nonsense to make a differentiation in release management based on the technology that is driving it. There is not application release management “on the IBM ” and then other kinds of application release management on Windows Server, Linux, or mainframe platforms.