Awesome post Scott!
I have seen the situation time and time again where an IT department has
cocooned itself in "job security", saving money on new technology, education
and training.
Eventually the IT professionals in the department themselves are
unemployable elsewhere because they haven't upgraded their own skills and
knowledge.
Thank you,
Norm Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Scott Klement
Sent: Wednesday, 27 August 2008 4:25 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: What should I say to a *nix community?
Hello folks,
My point is that being able to run old stuff unmodified can be very
bad for progress.
Running "old stuff unmodified" is a perfect expression of the old
engineer's maxim, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
I guess I would look at this a little differently.
The goal of IT should be to streamline business and make business more
profitable.
IT professionals should be familiar with new technology, and able to use
that technology when it benefits the business. (Unfortunately, far too
many IT professionals in our community don't keep up with technology
changes, and this results in IT holding the business back. That's very
bad -- and extraordinarily common in the i community -- in fact, one
might almost say "it's the norm" in the i community.)
On the other hand, the platform should be designed to make it possible
to keep old software when it's still the right software for the
business. So that upgrades are a BUSINESS decision, not forced by some
technological technicality.
In theory, the backward-compatibility offered by the IBM i platform
SHOULD be a catalyst for upgrades. After all, you can upgrade your
hardware and operating system with the knowledge that your existing apps
will still run. So, compatibility should not hold you back!
Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect, and these upgrades are far from
as painless as they should be in theory.
Worse, what Lukas has pointed out... folks get complacent. They DON'T
adopt new technology, even when it's good for the business, because
they're complacent and set in their ways. How often, in this community,
are old technologies kept purely because existing staff isn't familiar
with the new ones? Or doesn't want to learn? Every single day --
usually several times a day -- I hear people tell me that they can't use
the techniques I'm writing about because someone in their shop isn't
familiar with ILE -- so nobody can use ILE. Or their not allowed to use
Java for the same reason. Or things don't work because they haven't
properly configured TCP/IP on their system. Over and over and over
again, day in and day out I deal with this crap. This is nothing more
than IT holding businesses back because people are unwilling to learn
anything new.
IT should enable business, not hold it back. Change for change's sake
or for technicalities are not good. But never changing and holding the
business back isn't good either.
The trick is finding the right balance.
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