Re: One for The Ages

From: William M. Klein (wmklein_at_nospam.netcom.com)
Date: 03/13/05 

Date: Sun, 13 Mar 2005 22:24:58 GMT

>From the IBM-MAIN list

YMMV <G> 

-- 
Bill Klein
 wmklein <at> ix.netcom.com
> z/Journal Finally made the z/Bottom line (available online ... sort of in
> PDF format for some reason). Here is the article that I talked about last
> week.
>
> One For The Ages...
> Eric L. Vaughan
>
>
> Who would have thought it would come to this? The mainframe has survived an
> onslaught of misery, challenge and all-out conversion war to rise to a
> prominent place in todayıs business. The common knowledge of the ı90s that
> prophesized it was only a matter of time until the last of the big iron was
> unplugged has been replaced by a new group of devotees in awe of the
> mainframeıs continued abilities to deliver. Ironically, these companies are
> championed by the executives who didnıt listen to the ³wisdom² and kept
> using the technology that had more than returned their investments. Survive
> it did, and in a grand scale that no one could have guessed. But unless
> immediate action is taken on a wide scale to reverse the current course, the
> mainframe will die a certain and natural death.
>
> The mainframe community focused on all the important survival strategies
> except one. IBM buckled down and leveraged manufacturing economies to
> dramatically drive down the price per MIPS. They also found ways to open the
> mainframeıs proprietary doors to the world of open systems. Customers found
> ways to make their mainframe investments continue to be the benchmark that
> caused all other technology competitors to grow green with envy. But all
> parties missed one important point in the quest for mainframe survival: Itıs
> all about reproduction.
>
> Itıs a basic tenet of natural history. If a race doesnıt reproduce within
> its breed, it becomes extinct. And the mainframe race appears to have given
> up on the reproduction system. You can see it as you look at the
> monochromatic color spectrum across the mainframe landscape > gray.
>
> Gray, as in the color of the hair of all the people who are responsible for
> the continued growth, development, deployment, and management of the
> mainframe. We have an entire breed who is aging quickly; in fact, many will
> be departing the profession one way or another very soon. There is no formal
> call for cross-breeding. Something must be done. We didnıt come this far to
> be forced out by natural selection! Development teams at IBM are still
> crafting the very guts of the operating systems and many of the important
> technologies such as CICS, DB2 and others, in nearly the same Assembler
> language that has been used for the last 40 plus years. How many schools
> today are offering courses in Assembler language? What about IBM
> ³University²? Mainframe Assembler language is about to go the way of
> Aramaic. Any thoughts about ensuring that z/OS will still be able to be
> written, or even read?
>
> Attend any of the industry conferences around the globe, including SHARE,
> CMG, the IBM zSeries Conference and WAVV, and you see a remarkably singular
> demographic. Nearly all gray-haired and nearly all men.
>
> Take a hard look at your entire support staff, the programmers writing and
> modifying the very important thousands of lines of COBOL code and the
> systems people whose job it is to ensure the continued operation of the
> critical: hospital systems, international banking centers, scientific
> research facilities, national defense systems, air traffic control
> systems > your own backyard.
>
> Iıve had many conversations with people about this issue, and universally
> the response boils down to the same concept, ³Iıll be long retired by the
> time that becomes a problem >
> But someone needs to be! Itıs not overly dramatic to realize the critical
> nature of the worldıs infrastructure is still, and will continue to be,
> reliant on mainframe technology.
>
> And 15 years ago, the all-out assault to convert the mainframe to
> ³client/server² showed how infeasible that proved to be. So that canıt be an
> answer.
>
> This is a DEFCON 1 alert; itıs time for the board of directors of the
> worldıs corporations to map out a plan to solve this. Itıs time for IBM to
> ensure that the innerbreeding of 35-plus-year veterans are transmogrifying
> the new college grads to be able to continue to write and maintain the code
> that is still powering the world today. CEOs need to wake up to the fact
> that although they may retire in the next 10 to 15 years, so will most of
> the mainframe workforce they depend on today > their shoes! They owe it to 
> their shareholders to have a more forward view
> than that.
>
> CIOs must implement a plan that provides for crosstraining and a development
> plan of new talent. This includes systems programmers, application
> programmers, even operations support. IBM needs to communicate the same type
> of skill transfer effort to its customer base to ensure the investors of
> billions of dollars in mainframe technology that its investment will endure.
> Heeding our own pontifications, at illustro, weıve just begun training one
> of our 24-year-old Web developers in the fine art of mainframe Assembler
> language programming. These are the types of steps that must be taken.
>
> Or, we could wait until we all stop reading this magazine. It will be
> someone elseıs problem then. Thatıs z/Bottom Line.Z
>
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