Legacy Modernization and Skills

James Governor, with whom I had a very interesting unconference at IBM's Impact (more on it later), commented on a dialog he had with Yvonne Perkins in his blog -- on the whole aspect of CICS modernization.  Fundamentally, he is asserting that just wrappering is not enough, without skills growth a platform can only ever be a cash cow...

CICS has an IM counterpart -- IMS (which is often known as a database, but really is two things in one -- transaction manager and database). We are finding, indeed, skills to be an important issue, so we want to make the programming in and out of it easier, including soa verbs in and out, but a 100 other things. Xquery in and out. Mashups out.... I do not have the facts about our clients, but I am observing that in IMS development, this makes dev on ims also very exciting. And it attracts a lot of new talent.  Many start off at the edges, which due to modernization effort is almost no different than similar work in other middleware products that abound here at the site I am at.  But many get comfortable enough, that they migrate into the bowels of the IMS code, whose code, in many many cases, is older than them!!! A relatively large fraction of IMS developers satisfy this criterion!

So abstraction is not bad, it drives new usage, but for me, equally importantly, it drives new skills that keeps the platform going and going and going...