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zNextGen Provides Foundation for New System z Professionals

Note: This is the extended version of an interview originally published in the July issue of IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe edition.

Jim Michael may seem like an odd spokesperson for the zNextGen initiative. After all, he’s been working on mainframes for more than 20 years and has served on the SHARE board for five years. But ask Michael, an associate director of IT at a major western university, about the initiative and his eyes light up. To find out more about zNextGen, IBM Systems Magazine, Mainframe edition, caught up with Michael, who is the group’s board mentor, at the SHARE conference in Tampa, Fla.

Q: In a nutshell, what is zNextGen?

A: zNextGen is a collaboration between SHARE and IBM to provide a community for, an education focus for, new System z professionals. Some of those are young System z professionals getting out of college. Some are not as young changing careers and coming to the platform. We want to provide the right kind of education and networking opportunities for them because they’re new to the platform.

Q: Is zNextGen a SHARE initiative, an IBM initiative or both?

A: It’s primarily a SHARE initiative but we launched it with IBM. We talk to IBM all of the time about partnerships that might be mutually beneficial. With IBM’s Mainframe Charter and the Academic Initiative, clearly IBM has had its eye on this whole issue of making sure we’ve got enough large systems professionals going forward. We talked about that together and decided that we needed to try and launch something at SHARE that would target that community. In Boston, about 50 people turned out for the meeting—some of them SHARE folks, some from IBM and some young System z professionals. We talked about whether this might be a good idea and they were very enthusiastic. Then we launched the program between Boston in summer 2005 and Seattle in the spring of 2006.

We went out and asked the young professionals if anyone was willing to lead this. Initially, I was thinking we might have to seed that group with some SHARE volunteers. That wasn’t the case. Kristine Harper from Neon Enterprise Software in Houston, who is in her 20s and has been coming to SHARE since she was 18, raised her hand for the project manager position. IBMers Iris Rivera and Mike Todd said they would serve as the IBM reps. They’ve taken the ball and run with it. They’ve recruited volunteers. They hold monthly calls with their community of interested folks. They launched in Seattle with a grid of sessions relevant to that community and did it again in Baltimore. They had 140 sessions on their grid for Tampa. They’ve got more than 200 people on their mailing list who are involved and interested in zNextGen. So I’m very pleased.

Q: How did you identify the need for zNextGen? Did SHARE notice a drop in attendance or were companies coming to SHARE and saying they were experiencing a shortage of professionals? How did that come about?

A: SHARE didn’t notice a lack of attendance, but the board had been looking at the demographics of our attendees for a number of years. You don’t need to do a demographic study—many of the faces you saw at SHARE three years ago, four years ago, most of us look like I do. In our 40s, 50s, 60s. It’s that age attendee that was here primarily. We discussed it at the board level to see what could be done to address that. This was one response to seeing that demographic.

We didn’t have companies specifically coming to us and saying this is a problem, but we did have the press asking us about it. We were seeing studies showing that a substantial number of the folks working in the industry were older and extrapolated they were going to be retiring. So it was clear the industry was going to need a new influx of human resources—folks with the expertise to do this.

This is important to SHARE in three ways. From a strictly self-interested standpoint, if SHARE wants to continue doing what we do, if I want my kids to be able to come to SHARE if they get into IT, SHARE must remain vital and relevant. To do that, we’re going to have to have new IT professionals involved in the program. If IBM wants to continue successfully promoting and selling their large-systems solutions, the industry is going to need to feel comfortable that the right folks are going to be available to help them leverage the investment. And probably most importantly for industry—not just IT for IT's sake, but IT behind Wal-Mart, the banks and insurance companies, everything I hope to still be using after I retire—they’re going to need IT. We had a session earlier this week and the figure that was quoted was more than 90 percent of the key corporate data is still on the mainframe. They may have distributed systems that help them process that and expose it to the Web but the crown jewels of the corporation are still on the mainframe and we need to make sure we’re supporting the folks that are getting into this business and promoting it, making sure they feel they’re going to be successful by giving them a community, a year-round experience. We’ve done more and more to make sure they can interact throughout the year, not just at the conferences and we’re building on that. Hopefully students and young professionals will look at that and say, “I’m not going to be alone. I’ve got this community of peers. There are employment opportunities.”

While I don’t see it as a crisis in terms of employment, it’s very clearly an area of opportunity we can market to students considering careers. There’s not going to be a glut of large-systems professionals anytime soon. It’s going to remain a market where people with those skills will be in demand.

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