Avoiding Generational Skirmishes

The phrase "don't trust anyone over 30" is more than 30 years old now, and that makes it highly antiquated, especially in terms of avoiding generational strife in IT departments. According to a new Forrester Research report, both older IT workers with mainframe skills and younger workers with new-technology skills bring value to an organization. "The truth is that as a combined team of talented individuals, the two groups are far more powerful than either will ever be by themselves," the report says. Furthermore, according to analyst Phil Murphy in this Q&A, CIOs must take steps to prevent generation gaps from opening up in their own departments, asking older workers to mentor their younger counterparts and retraining those employees who are willing to tackle new technologies. Q: What would you advise CIOs to do to keep generational skirmishes from starting? A: Don't let the war of words become a war of deeds. We have enough to do within IT organizations without being distracted. If IT kept early complaints from continuing, it would be easy to keep any such conversations from becoming a pitched battle between new and old, young and old, and Java and everything that came before, or COBOL and everything that came before. Service-oriented architecture [SOA] is in most people's future, so let's just loosely couple what we do and invoke standards to link that work. SOA is technology-agnostic—it doesn't care if it's connecting COBOL or Java. It cares only that the service is reliable. In that kind of architecture, both camps have a lot to offer the other. There's another reason this is the case. I've just finished a report on migration, and one of the people I spoke to talked about moving from a small mainframe to a Wintel platform because the third-party software costs on mainframe applications were killing his company. By making the move, it could save a lot of money on platform costs. But what this person noted was very enlightening. If there's an area in Wintel that's weak, it's the maturity of the operational side: job scheduling, job dependencies, and the like. In a mainframe environment, if you want to throw 50 gigabytes at a database, it knows how to deal with it. On a Wintel platform, you have to apportion it. The maturity and knowledge of the mainframe operations person is a badly needed discipline—even Microsoft acknowledges that. IT can and must take the people with those skills and move them to newer platforms. Q: In your report, you advise IT to focus on the "middle third" of your staff. How do you define that space? A: The phrase wasn't mine; I borrowed it from a colleague. And it doesn't really matter what the percentage is—whether it's one third or split 25-50-25, the sentiment remains the same. There are folks who know what they know and are comfortable with what they know. At the opposite end, you have folks who are dying to move their career forward. They openly want and seek out new technology. You don't have to worry about that group, because they're leading the charge forward. It's the middle third that could go either way, and that group you have to manage, because they could become either new-technology zealots or curmudgeons. Manage the group that needs managing to make sure they go in the best direction. Q: How did you discern who's in the middle third? A: The people who are dying for new technology are making noise, seeking training for new things. Managers know who they are. I contend that managers also know who the curmudgeons are. They're excellent at what they do; have deep knowledge of COBOL, VSAM, or CICS; and have resisted efforts at training. They have more subtly made their preferences known. In fact, they're far easier to identify. Everyone else is in the middle. I would survey that group, just because you may find that someone you thought was in the middle is actually in one camp or another. Q: When you talk about older workers and their relationships, it sounds like IT workers tend to stay longer than CIOs. Do you have any statistics on this? A: I absolutely believe that, but I don't have any statistics. Q: Are there companies deploying the mentoring programs you suggest? A: I wrote a piece a while back about the business model of a consulting firm that hired nothing but technologists with very deep knowledge. They take on projects, bring in their team as mentors, and transfer their skills to the staff as the project progresses. That's much better than having the consultants develop a system and then toss it at your people to maintain. Feedback question: Tell us what you're doing to capture the knowledge and skills of older workers. Q&A conducted by contributing Web editor Howard Baldwin.