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March 2008 - Posts
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Mainframe Community, Ecosystem and SHARE
Well, it's been about a week and a half since I returned home from SHARE in Orlando, Florida, and I think I've recovered enough to collect my thoughts and impressions.
And my first thought on the matter is: SHARE is one very important mainframe user community and conference!
It's interesting to think about the fact that SHARE was actually founded in 1955, nine years before the IBM System/360 mainframe was born (on April 7, 1964). Originally, it was a community of business computer users for whom this was a forum to SHARE information (it's not an acronym; as I understand it, it's all uppercase because their computers only used uppercase at the time). And one kind of information they shared was suggestions about how to improve business computers, which they told to IBM.
That would suggest that SHARE actually influenced the development of the IBM mainframe.
In any case, since 1964, SHARE has become focused mainly on supporting users of this platform. In fact, it's a central part of what might be called the mainframe community, or even ecosystem.
That's important. Just like the mainframe is no longer an island in the world of enterprise IT, it's also important that individual mainframe-using organizations and technologists not be isolated from others who use the same technologies.
So, what did I do at the SHARE conference? First, I learned, attending a good number of educational sessions that allowed me to increase my general awareness of issues, technologies and approaches in various mainframe contexts. There are educational sessions from Sunday afternoon through Friday morning.
Of course, someone has to present these sessions. Since SHARE is a volunteer-run organization, that means it's up to each of us as attendees to consider whether we have something to offer that would be of value to others. In my case, I gave a couple of presentations on ITIL and then supported a few more based around the zNextGen project for people who are new to the mainframe or have a new role on that platform.
Another thing I did at SHARE was participate as a member of the community. For me, that meant being involved with two of the projects at SHARE (projects are subject-area focused parts of programs, which are based around larger subject areas, and which are the essential constituent organizations of SHARE). One was the Security and Auditing project, and the other was zNextGen. In addition, there were various opportunities for networking with other mainframers, including at the evening receptions.
The next SHARE will be held August 10-15 in San Jose, California, and I'm planning to be there too, presenting, learning and supporting the ecosystem.
Great, but why is this all so important? Because, at the end of the day, business computing (including mainframes) is all about business, and business is all about people, and people need to meet with, socialize with and learn from other people in order to make the world of business and computing turn. So, as we all return from this conference and bring everything we learned back to our jobs, we understand more, do better work, and advance the cause of responsible enterprise-wide business computing.
By the way, while SHARE is a very important organization that holds a regular mainframe-relevant conference, it's not the only one. There are similar organizations elsewhere in the world, and companies such as CA also have such conferences. Our next one is CA World, which will be held at The Venetian Congress and Sands Expo Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada November 16 - 20, 2008. And believe me, we're going to have some great mainframe content there as well!
To find out more about SHARE, you can visit http://share.org/
To find out more about zNextGen, see http://znextgen.org/
And, to find out more about CA World, see http://caworld.com/
I hope to see you at one or more of these!
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