Managing change

“Automating change” misses an opportunity to show how mature mainframe change management/version control systems are. I believe change management was founded in the mainframe technology environment, thus making it the model for change and configuration management in non-centralized PC (desktop and server-based) and midrange computer processing environments. The mainframe still manages 80% of the critical data processing applications running in corporate America. The highly developed change management techniques within the mainframe have greatly contributed to its success as a stable and secure processing platform.

Jim Bandinelli
Buffalo, N.Y.

Training is the answer

Regarding “IT worker shortage”: If more companies were willing to train/retrain people with older IT skills, there wouldn't be this problem. I'm unemployed and have a BS in computer science and 15+ years working with MS Access, SQL and VBA, but I'm having a really hard time finding work. I've applied for various other IT jobs where my skills would benefit the company but may not be an exact match for the job, and no one wanted to make the effort or take the time to train me into that position. What I also found was that most of these places had already gone a month with one or more people missing in their departments before beginning the hiring process. Now, if they can go a month or more with a shortage of staff where those left have to pick up the slack, why is it that they are so resistant to hiring someone they may need to train for a couple of months? They've already proven that they can handle the extra strain with no one there; seems to me that having someone there in training is better than no one at all.

David Brefka
Elmira, N.Y.

More on stopping spam

Regarding Daniel Briere’s column, "Carriers: Make stopping spam a priority" : Let's look at this from a different viewpoint. There are many different forms of deliverables driving our economy. The first big economic boom was based on hard goods (the Industrial Revolution). Then a new economic horizon approached via the deliverable of soft goods (the software industry).

What is the next plateau? I would argue it is information goods (Google, Yahoo and other successful portals understand this and are paving the way, while at the same time gathering very healthy revenue streams).

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