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Jill Eckhaus, the president of AFCOM, an Orange, Calif.-based professional association for data center managers spoke with Computerworld yesterday about the key issues facing AFCOM's members and the need to change the perception among young IT workers that managing data centers isn't an exciting job.
What are the big issues for data center managers these days? Security is huge because [end users] aren't just internal but external as well, because you have people on the Internet. Spam is a big issue in data centers now. Regulatory compliance is big. Disaster recovery has become a huge issue since 9/11. A lot of things have happened, and data center managers have to be a lot more on the ball than they used to be because the outside world has changed so much.
Downsizing staffs is another big issue. If you cut down on your staff, that's not always the most cost-efficient way to run your data center. You might have to spend more money to buy software to manage the operations for you.
Speaking of data center staffing, we always hear about a looming shortage of mainframe skills. But we get lots of e-mail from out-of-work Cobol programmers saying they can't find jobs. How do you reconcile those two things? You can't train somebody in India to manage a data center, but you can train them to do Cobol programming. When we talk about an enterprise systems skills shortage, we mean things like change management and running the facilities. We're not talking about Cobol programming, which unfortunately is really easy to outsource.
Jill Eckhaus, the president of AFCOM
Is there enough interest among up-and-coming IT workers in acquiring mainframe skills to make it economically feasible for universities to offer training programs? We call it an enterprise systems skills shortage because it's more than mainframes now. But we need to get young people going into IT excited about doing these jobs. This issue isn't going to go away. Data center workers have always tended to be in their late 40s and 50s, but this time there's no younger IT workers coming along to replace them.
Why not? I think it's a perception that they have. If you just look at the mainframe, it's seen as a dinosaur -- and who wants to work on
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