Transparency

Every datapoint. Every question.

MOMCI 2026 collects exactly five categories of data. All of it is listed here. Nothing else is collected.

Datapoints

What is collected

1 · Answers. The 25 items below. Every item is skippable; “I don’t know” and “prefer not to say” are never penalized.

2 · Interaction paradata (data-quality checks only): time per item, answer revisions, back-navigation, keyboard vs. mouse use, slider touches, clarifier opens, option display order, viewport size, total time. If a session ends before submission, an anonymous progress marker is recorded — items answered, screen reached, time spent; never answer content — used only to study drop-off and improve the instrument.

3 · Submission record: random receipt ID, instrument version, record class (standard / test / questionable), a salted one-way IP hash used only for rate-limiting, timestamp. Also a coarse source tag — which channel brought you here (e.g. linkedin / share / direct), read from the link you clicked or the referring site. Channel-level only; never unique to an individual. No name, no email, no login, no cookies. The schema contains no identity fields.

4 · Site performance (RUM). First-party real-user monitoring of Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP, CLS — plus TTFB, load time, viewport width, and navigation type, sent once per visit via a beacon. No IP address, no user agent, no cookies, no identifiers stored. No third-party analytics anywhere on this site.

5 · Optional sign-up (only if you use the participate page): email, stated interests, consent version. Stored separately, with no link to survey responses, and excluded from all published data.

The Instrument

The 25 questions, verbatim

Domain 01 — Technical Identity & Role Architecture

  1. How long have you worked with mainframe systems?
  2. Which best describes your primary operational domain?
  3. How is mainframe infrastructure engineering structured in your organization?
  4. What is your single deepest area of expertise?
  5. How many other people in your organization share that expertise?
  6. What is the estimated scale of your current mainframe footprint?
  7. Which industry best describes your organization?

Domain 02 — Operational Workflow & Toil

  1. Averaging over the past four weeks, what share of your engineering hours went to unplanned break-fix versus planned engineering work?
  2. In the past month, how often did you personally intervene manually — at the terminal — to resolve an alert or keep something running?
  3. Scenario: a known, recurring issue fires an alert at 3 AM. What most likely happens?
  4. How much of the work that keeps your platform stable would leadership be unaware of?
  5. Do you personally maintain undocumented automation — local REXX execs, Assembler exits, JCL overrides — that is critical to subsystem stability?
  6. Which architectural component is recognized internally as operationally fragile, but reports as healthy in official dashboards?

Domain 03 — Workload & Sustainability

  1. In the past 90 days, how many incidents pulled you in outside your scheduled on-call rotation?
  2. At current staffing and workload, how long can your team sustain operations before deferred maintenance becomes critical failure?
  3. If your role were vacated tomorrow, how long would it take a transfer or new hire to reach your current environmental proficiency?
  4. In the past year, have you seriously considered leaving mainframe work?
  5. Would you recommend a mainframe career to a talented junior engineer today?

Domain 04 — Organizational Innovation Posture

  1. Scenario: an engineer on your team proposes automating a manual recovery procedure. What most likely happens?
  2. In recent modernization initiatives — Zowe adoption, CI/CD pipelines, automation rollouts — the primary limiting factor was:
  3. When a demonstrable architectural optimization is proposed — for example tuning buffer pools to cut MSU consumption — what is the typical outcome?
  4. What is the single biggest source of friction for improvement work?

Domain 05 — Practitioner-Defined Resiliency Gaps

  1. If unconstrained by approvals or budget, what specific architectural change — GDPS, VSAM RLS migration, automated CF structure rebuilds, anything — would you deploy to eliminate your highest-risk single point of failure, and why?
  2. Which KPI currently mandated by leadership provides the least insight into actual system health — and what metric should replace it?
  3. Name one operational reality of mainframe infrastructure that distributed-systems management frameworks consistently fail to accommodate.

Generated from instrument v1.8 (16 July 2026). The live instrument is the authoritative text; this list is republished whenever the instrument version changes. A no-typing variant of the instrument replaces the four open-text questions with closed equivalents covering the same constructs (specialty replaceability, first-priority resiliency fix, least-informative mandated KPI, distributed-frameworks blind spot); responses from that variant are tagged variant: lite in the record.