Mainframe operations has never had a number it could put beside Google’s. As of today, the instrument that produces one is in the field.
Google’s SRE organization publishes its operational-load discipline openly: toil — the reactive, manual, tactically necessary work that produces no durable engineering value — is capped at 50% of engineering time, and reported toil averages roughly a third of an SRE’s time.1, 2 Those two figures are the closest thing platform operations has to a public reference point for how much reactive work a sustainable team carries.
No comparable figure has ever been published for the mainframe workforce. The field’s largest annual survey measures platform sentiment and investment priorities — 97% of respondents view the platform positively — but does not measure toil composition, informal escalation load, or the behavioral layer beneath them.3 The count of published instruments built to measure mainframe operational maturity and practitioner sustainability at that layer is zero.
Google’s published ceiling on SRE toil — the operational-load cap the discipline is managed against.1
Reported average share of an SRE’s time spent on toil — the external benchmark the mainframe number will stand beside.1, 2
Published equivalents for the mainframe workforce. The gap the MOMCI Index exists to close.
As of instrument v1.5, MOMCI’s core workload item asks practitioners to average their reactive-versus-proactive split over the past four weeks — the same recall frame Google uses to measure SRE toil.2 The alignment is deliberate. When the MOMCI dataset reaches publishable size, the mainframe reactive-work figure and Google’s published SRE figure become directly comparable, like for like, for the first time.
That comparison — the toil gap — is the first derivative the Index is engineered to produce, and the planned headline of the first findings report. It is not the only one. The instrument’s advocacy item is benchmarkable against the industry’s published 97% platform-positivity figure;3 its sustainability and informal-escalation constructs sit against industry burnout and retention reporting; and its scenario-based culture items follow the behavioral-construct methodology validated at scale by the DORA research program.6
Every revision below follows the survey-science evidence base — AAPOR best practices, Pew question-wording guidance, and the recall-specificity and sensitive-question literature.4, 5
“Typical week” became “averaging over the past four weeks” on the toil ratio, with one-month and three-month anchors added to the manual-intervention and informal-escalation items. Anchored windows outperform typicality judgments; they also created the Google comparability above.
The workaround and career-reflection items now open with normalizing preambles — “Workarounds are normal in complex systems”; “Career reflection is common in every field.” Normalization measurably improves honest reporting on admissions that carry professional risk.
The sustainability item dropped its agree/disagree scale — which invites yes-bias — for an item-specific one: Very sustainable, Mostly sustainable, Borderline, Unsustainable, Already past unsustainable.4
The modernization item now anchors to the most recent discussion the respondent was actually part of, and a subtly leading qualifier was removed from the prompt. Culture is measured by recalled events, not invited editorial.
Substrata Research’s empirical constraint — every finding requires traceable data lineage; unsourced output is not delivered — governs this program’s own publications. Field collection at v1.5 is open now. The toil-gap number will be published when the dataset can source it, at a disclosed sample size — not before.
What ships today is what can be verified today: the benchmark, the instrument, and the method. All three are above.
Sources.
1. Google, Site Reliability Engineering, ch. 5, “Eliminating Toil” —
sre.google/sre-book/eliminating-toil
2. Google, The Site Reliability Workbook, “Eliminating Toil” (four-week
toil measurement) — sre.google/workbook/eliminating-toil
3. BMC, 20th Annual Mainframe Survey — bmc.com/info/mainframe-survey
4. Pew Research Center, Writing Survey Questions — pewresearch.org/writing-survey-questions
5. AAPOR, Best Practices for Survey Research — aapor.org/standards-and-ethics/best-practices
6. DORA research program — dora.dev/research