A friend of mine bought a 20-foot boat last summer so he could take his family tubing, water skiing, and fishing. It’s fast, fairly easy to operate, and
relatively inexpensive to fix and maintain.
One person can do most of the tasks required to get the boat in and out of
the water and it doesn’t take long to learn how to do most tasks involving a
small craft like his.
This summer, my family is planning on
spending a week’s vacation on a cruise liner.
In doing some research, I found that the boat, at top speed, is only
half as fast as my friend’s 20-foot boat and common sense (and a very long 1996
movie) tells me that the ship can’t turn nearly as quickly in the water. And it takes thousands of people to make a
cruise ship do what it does, from deck hands and entertainment staff all the
way up through the ship’s captain.
In other words, a novice may be able to
keep a speedboat running, but that doesn’t mean he knows how to operate a
cruise liner. But operated well, a
cruise liner is a smoothly operated vessel that will make thousands of people
satisfied customers.
Think of the mainframe as that cruise
liner. Many organizations have invested
a lot of time and money into making sure that the mainframes are operating at
peak efficiency – much of that knowledge, however, is held within long-tenured,
very experienced employees who may be thinking about buying their own fishing
boats and heading into retirement.
More specifically,
does the end of working life for the generation of ‘baby boomers’ mean problems
for the many businesses for which the mainframe is still the most
mission-critical server?
The story sounds dire, but it doesn’t have to be. We’ll pick up on Wednesday and talk about a way
to keep crucial mainframe expertise in place even when your mainframe experts
are no longer an email or phone call away.
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
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