Tuesday's IBM announcements provided much rhetoric and some information about the new CICS Explorer facility, e.g., > CICS is a leader in transaction processing and, in conjunction > with z/OS and DB2®, delivers levels of performance, > availability, and security that are hard to match. To prepare for > the > future, IBM intends to make significant contributions to the > CICS offerings > that will help to reduce the skills barriers to the > development of CICS > applications and the management of CICS > systems.However one judges the > merits of this proposal one can only admire the felicity of the euphemism > "skills barriers". There are two polar ways to cope with these skills barriers. The obvious, traditional one is to provide apprenticeships and/or intensive training that convert qualified unskilled people into skilled ones. The other is to attempt to embody the necessary skills in a program, a wizard or the like, that notionally makes it possible to dispense with imparting these skills to people who will do a particular job, thus---this is apparently judged highly desirable---dumbing down the requirements of that job.This is not the first such IBM initiative, and I know of none that has been successful. Devoting resources to making traditional professional-training opportunities available would be much more effective, and it would bode better for the future of CICS. The appeal of schemes for permitting unskilled (and thus perhaps but not usually cheaper in the aggregate) people to do what only the skilled can do now is obvious, but this appeal is not enough: all sorts of appealing notions are and will remain infeasible. John GilmoreAshland, MA 01721-1817USA _________________________________________________________________ Reveal your inner athlete and share it with friends on Windows Live. http://revealyourinnerathlete.windowslive.com?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WLYIA_whichathlete_us ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
