CICS Analogy

In the beginning Hursley the Magnificent concluded that the office known as The Address Space required a chief clerk whose initials were CICS.

As chief clerk, CICS was responsible for progressing all jobs, also known as transactions, through the office. Most jobs would come directly from customers when they pressed the "Enter Button" at the office's many entrances known as terminals.

In order to achieve the requirement of turning round all jobs in the shortest possible time, CICS was to treat as its own, not just the office but the floor it was located on, and avoid delegation if possible. Nonetheless situations arose beyond the control of CICS which inhibited the progress of a particular job, and in these situations it was the duty of CICS to suspend that job and progress another until the impediment could be overcome.

Within the responsibilities laid down to CICS on being appointed chief clerk was a description of all the likely jobs to be received, and their relative importance. This helped CICS decide which jobs should take priority.

Not all jobs handled by CICS were from customers, on occasions CICS would initiate housekeeping jobs. For instance if the office ran out of paper CICS would request paper from the paper store down the corridor. Obviously until the paper arrived, all jobs requiring paper would need to be suspended, but other jobs could continue unimpeded unless they were dependent upon one of the suspended jobs.

Over time CICS started to feel indispensable, having responsibilities for Finance, Order Processing, Stock Management, Staff Details, and Mail among others. Besides the Corporate responsibilities CICS also helped manage relationships with other offices. Sometimes this would cause stress either to CICS or the staff of the other offices.

An example of this type of stress condition occurred when CICS requested information from a colleague called IMS in another office. At the time IMS was processing a large order for a major customer called Batch Job, and was not able to respond for sometime. CICS was extremely put out by this as more and more of the work coming through the CICS office was being suspended due to the lack of information from IMS. CICS remembered how much trouble there was last time this happened, as the solution of shutting the office and refusing to talk to IMS or anybody else was not well received by anybody.

Another concern for CICS was the growth in workload and responsibilities. With an office of a specified size, and only one pair of hands, there was only so much work that could be done; yet the amount of work expected kept growing. This did not go unnoticed by Hursley the Magnificent who contrived to teach CICS the art of delegation.

Hursley concluded that the size of the office was the significant inhibitor, and hence recruited a number of assistant clerks, each with their own office to help CICS out. Rather confusingly, all the assistants also had the initials CICS. The gem of Hursley's plan was that all work would continue to come through the chief clerk's office, the original CICS now being given the job title "Master". Armed with the brief of what work could be expected, what priority each job had, and what skills might be needed to complete the job, the Master could delegate the job to one of the assistants. The beauty of the scheme was that if any assistant became ill, the infection would not be passed to the Master or any of the other assistants as they were each in their own office.

Like all good plans it was believed that it should have a suitable title, which could be abbreviated to a three-letter acronym, and this became MRO. The plan was capable of being further developed to the point where the assistants did not have to be in the same building, but could be at some other geographic location, again a three-letter acronym ISC was produced.

The problem with the MRO grand plan was that it was constrained by the number of offices. Remember that there were other employees in the company and many of them wanted their own office, often for their own use and did not like sharing. The number of offices available, although a problem, was less of a problem than the number of floors available in the building known as "The Computer". This was a problem because although any floor, known as a processing unit, could support any number of offices, only one office was allowed the lights on at any moment in time. Without lights, the clerks could not do their jobs, they had to wait until it was their turn to have the lights on.

The solution whilst obvious, took a while to implement, as a new building was required which had many more floors. In this brand new building, not only are there sufficient offices and assistants, there can be enough floors to progress each job independently. CICS was so impressed with the magnificence of this new scheme that the title of CICS The Supremo, or CICS/TS for short, was adopted.