Mainframe staff shortage looms as boomers retire while usage grows

Stan Beer
Thursday, 20 November 2008 00:58

IT People - Enterprise

Get set for a shortage of staff with mainframe expertise as baby boomers who cut their teeth on big iron cash in their pension cheques and head off for a life under a palm tree in the sun. The problem is that mainframe use is still growing, according to a new report.

CA today announced the results of a global study indicating that enterprise IT organisations are losing their experienced mainframe personnel to retirement just as their use of the mainframe is projected to grow significantly.

The study, conducted by TheInfoPro in September and early October, surveyed 270 senior IT executives from Fortune 2000 companies around the world. All respondents had applications running on the mainframe platform.

The study revealed that 80% of respondents have mainframe staff eligible for retirement either now or within two years. It also revealed that mainframe spending—which had been in decline over the past two years—is now projected to rise.

According to CA, this is occurring as utilisation of applications currently running on the mainframe increases, new applications are developed for the mainframe, and application workloads are shifted to the mainframe from distributed systems.

Results from the survey showed 50% of respondents said that their mainframe spending was higher two years ago than it is today, while 63% said it would be higher two years from now.  12% predicted that their mainframe spending would decrease over the next two years.

Respondents shared a variety of planned approaches to coping with the “greying” of their mainframe workforces. Top responses included the hiring and training of new talent, consolidation of mainframe vendors, and deploying solutions that make the mainframe easier to use.

Respondents were asked to rate these various approaches in terms of both how “practical” and how “helpful” they considered them to be.

New hiring ranked the highest as the most potentially helpful (83%), and also ranked highly as being practical (78%).

Asked to name the management tasks they believed would suffer most from shortfalls in mainframe staffing, respondents cited security (55%), storage (47%), workload management (46%), and database management (26%).

“It is clear that enterprise IT organisations need to start taking steps now to ensure their ability to continue leveraging mainframe technology—which delivers the scalability, reliability, security, cost-efficiency, and energy-efficiency so essential to the fulfillment of the IT mission—despite the loss of their most experienced mainframe professionals,” said Chris O’Malley, executive vice president and general manager of CA’s Mainframe Business Unit.

Based on the results of the study, there may well be a boom in mainframe training courses over the coming years.

Complete survey results are available online here.