Commentary--Was anybody else not surprised by the recent Foote Partners finding that the ongoing demand for workers skilled in SAP technologies grew dramatically stronger in recent months? In an economy governed by the principles of supply and demand, we can expect to see heightened interest and opportunities in what is viewed as more traditional application knowledge such as SAP, Oracle and PowerBuilder along with--dare I predict it--COBOL.
As enterprise Web 2.0 makes its way into organizations, there is a misconception held among a pocket in the industry that the new technologies will replace the old; eliminating the need to fill the gaps left by the previous generation who built careers around managing enterprise applications. There are three primary reasons why this misconception is just that.
The first is the fact that existing applications don't die, they simply evolve. Companies have invested technology and intellectual resources to track every aspect of their business from human resources files to customer databases to inventory management. To abandon these vast amounts of knowledge would be foolhardy.
However, the Achilles heel for many companies was the lack of documentation as these enterprise applications were tweaked and customized to meet the businesses' needs. This wasn't as big an issue when there were plenty of candidates to fill the lucrative jobs in application development and management. Today, however, these candidates are retiring and taking their intellectual knowledge with them. When lacking an aerial view of the infrastructure, redundancies and bad code proliferate.
The second issue is the growing interest in enterprise Web 2.0. Taking a page or two from consumer-oriented sites, businesses are embracing enterprise Web 2.0 capabilities to get closer to customers, create a more flexible infrastructure and boost productivity.
Yet adding on new capabilities to a website or empowering employees with social media tools won't be enough to justify the investments in these emerging technologies. The real value of enterprise 2.0 comes from linking up-to-the-minute information with what we already know about our business. To realize this value requires in-depth knowledge of the underlying applications.
The third issue is the health of the mainframe and the exaggerated reports of its death. There are millions of lines of COBOL still being developed and used today. However, less and less IT professionals are inclined to learn it.
Of course, we as an industry are to blame to some degree for the impending dearth of IT pros. Colleges and universities have scaled back or eliminated teaching traditional programming languages for more current disciplines. As business leaders, we didn't predict the potential negative implications when we set out to customize our applications. And when we first heard about the potential IT skills drought, we said we'd worry about it later.
Now is later.
As companies look to make the most of what they already have while using the latest enterprise Web 2.0 technologies, it's in their best interest to invest in attracting and retaining what were once deemed legacy skill sets. And for those folks who are looking to maximize their market value in todays challenging economy, you can likely expect an upswing in workshops and seminars dedicated to managing traditional enterprise applications. We will continue to see a steady demand along with a steady rise in salaries of IT pros skilled in enterprise applications.
biography
Jeremy Chone is chief technology officer for Nexaweb Technologies.
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