Note to myself – listen more; be engaged more often!
“Creating engagement is what we do in media and it’s what we do as business owners – because, ultimately, it’s what keeps folks coming back.” This quote was taken from the very end of an article by Australian deputy-editor of Food and Wine, Melanie Hansche, who not only writes about food and wine but has opened her own restaurant in eastern Pennsylvania. When I read it I first dog-eared the page and set it down on my office desk only to forget about it for a couple of weeks – it was published in the November, 2019, “Thanksgiving Issue” of the magazine. By chance, I just happened to glance at the overturned magazine, saw the dog-eared page and remembered why this quote has stuck with me ever since I read the full article.
When it comes to technology and in particular, Information Technology, within the circles I move, it’s common knowledge that communities count a lot. I have been part of the HPE NonStop community for half of my working life in technology and this continues to surprise me as my early days were spent entirely coding for IBM mainframes. For me, NonStop was my second act but quickly surpassed anything that occurred during my first act. In fact, it was around this time in 1979 that I wrote my last lines of IBM 370 Assembler code and since that date, I haven’t written a single line of code (and the community breathes a collective sigh of relief). Interestingly I have been spending significant amount of time with the NonStop community of late and this engagement was influenced by the very first user group event I ever attended and it was not a gathering of NonStop stakeholders.
It happened to be in 1979 as well and it was a meeting of the IBM mainframe SHARE – GUIDE group held at the Kings Cross Hyatt, Sydney, Australia. One very strong impression that I had from this meeting was the camaraderie of the group and this too was what I witnessed at my first ITUG Summit. It was in Nice, France and it was the ITUG Summit (Europe). Both user communities had much in common and at some point I have always wondered whether collaboration would be entertained as these two groups represent the soul of enterprise IT as it stands today. It is not something I reference all that often but having served on the boards of both the SHARE and ITUG user groups – a unique circumstance as best as I can tell – I cannot see this happening any time soon but we can but then again, never say never, right?
Creating engagement among enterprise IT professionals irrespective of the systems and platforms – and yes, many of the Fortune 500 / Global 1000 have both Mainframes and NonStop systems on the floor of their data centers. Even more relevant perhaps is that both support virtualization and in so doing, provide choice – virtualized on Power chip then go with MVS; virtualized on x86 then go with NonStop Kernel (NSK)! Hybrid IT and Clouds? Then yes, both of them play nicely in these environments as well albeit I have to tip my hat to NonStop as there are more instances of x86 clouds than any implemented around Power.
Having written this there remains considerable competitiveness between IBM and HPE even as those working inside the data center have their preferred systems and platforms. Good stories though need their advocates as well as their provocateurs – the sparring brings a certain amount of uncertainty to the story line and keeps the readers coming back for more. Having built a business around social media where the focus has been on the enterprise, knowing that there are active user communities creating engagement is encouraging and yes even as an analysts, commentators, bloggers my wife Margo and I are small business owners in every sense of the word. Our business just happens to be information collection and sharing, but it’s just one more ingredient in the complex mix that is required to keep communities engaged. In turn this engagement keeps new requirements’ percolating that in turn drives vendor development, be that with IBM or HPE.
After many decades in the industry focused on the data center – yes, there was a time I advocated passionately for the plug compatible Nixdorf 8890 mainframes of the mid 1980s; anyone remember them? – what’s keeping folks coming back today to media such as this? Well, for starters, are we preparing for the virtual machine versus container discussions? Are we looking to populate the edge the same way we developed the core / cloud? Is DevOps the end game and more importantly, as clouds become ubiquitous, are we preparing for the post-cloud era? And what of memory / storage advancements – are we preparing to have the world’s data online all the time and instantly directly accessible? All of this (or indeed none of this) are important topics that keep the communities coming back and for anyone who has a presence on traditional or social media there are more than enough topics to keep everyone engaged.
Note to myself? As one of those contributors with media presence what’s driving me and many of my colleagues is the need to listen more intently than we have ever listened in the past. In so doing, we will find ourselves even more engaged with our respective communities. Enterprises are advancing, like the incoming tide – a little further up the beach each time before falling back. But like the incoming tide, the sea gradually works its way up to the high water mark. And what am I hearing? As much as the media hypes a vision individual contributor’s advocate, not all enterprises are moving at a similar pace and in this regard, the volatility is noticeable. Which is the polite way to say: This is what continues to fuel the media and, in so doing, ensures engagement continues even as we know enterprise IT professionals will keep on coming back!