There's a funny sort of dysfunction that is ruling many of today's IT departments. They're so busy dealing with all the squeaky wheels of distributed computing that their staffing levels have gotten completely out of balance. On the mainframe, which is often still handling a majority of their production data and processing, staffing levels have remained the same or gone down, while the staffing levels have gone through the roof for the many distributed computers that handle the remaining minority of data and processing.
This is a problem for a number of reasons.
First, since universities and colleges are not producing IT graduates at a rate that can keep up with exploding demand, it means that it will be harder and harder to find enough qualified people to run the distributed part of an IT organization's computing environment.
Second, it means that, in these times of financial austerity, there is a disproportionately high requirement for expensive staff to handle a small portion of the processing requirements.
Third, in a political worst-case scenario, the exaggerated staffing levels required by distributed IT gives non-mainframers a majority when it comes to political and strategic decisions, which can easily lead to a money-and-functionality-losing downward spiral as the mainframers' voice of reason gets progressively drowned out.
Fortunately, like Winston Churchill (one of my personal heroes), we mainframers "never give up."
But it's also nice to have a bit of encouragement, such as this cartoon offers:
