Modern Workplace IT SkilLS
September 10th 2025
The baseball manager Earl Weaver once said, ‘It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.’
IT Articles
This section has articles of a more serious nature although not too technical. They cover aspects of IT rarely seen in current education and give a new perspective to the subject. One of the most neglected topics in IT education is the mainframe which, despite rumours of its death, is alive and performing much of the world's work.
Females in IT
This topic has been the subject of more studies and surveys than the death of Elvis, with similar results, that is, none. In 2018, I devised a simple survey for high school females aged 14-18 with an extra not seen in others; free-form input.
The results and my conclusions can be read in the link below. Unfortunately, my name seems to have been expuged from the official CAS report below.
Digital Transformation
Digital transformation (DTX) is about as well understood as the equations in Einstein's General Relativity theory. This is no surprise because DTX means different things to almost everybody. The link below, part of the 'Introduction to Modern IT' might clear up some of the mystery.
Dead Man Walking - I
This topic covers the mainframe myth of its demise, buried with full military honours. During an autopsy, this corpse showed the following results;
- 92 of the top 100 banks use a Mainframe
- 23 of the top 25 airlines rely on Mainframe
- 10 of the world's top 10 insurance Agencies count on the Mainframe
- 71% of Fortune 500 Companies depend on the Mainframe
- Mainframes handle 30 billion transactions every day
- 80% of the world's business data is storedor handled on a Mainframe
- 90% of credit card transactions are processed by a Mainframe
- Up to $3 trillion in commercial commerce flows through a Mainframe every day.
An article I read; 'The Day the Mainframe Died' presented a picture of a worldwide was as bad as the Crowdstrike - AWS failure in mid-2024.
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Resilience Trinity
This article introduces the increasingly important topic of resilience which means more than just keeping the IT show on the road with backups. In short, resilience is the ability to resume ones business after a setback.
In boxing, resilience is the ability to recover from a punch (IT normal recovery) or knock down (IT disaster recovery). However, it has connotations beyond just that, inasmuch as the boxer must prepare himself via tough training, a fight plan and coaching to avoid the knockdown and, should it happen, he should be fit enough to recover and rejoin the fray quickly enough to beat the 10 second count.
This article examines the three main areas of It resilience and how they coalesce as a 'trinity' to be handled as such,
NEXT ARTICLE
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Availability Myths
This article outlines system availability and also discusses some sleight of hand used by people who claim super-fast recovery after failures.
It also boils down to what MTTR (Mean Time to Recover/Repair/Restart etc.) really means.
Percentiles Response
This article covers the important topic of response times, their interpretation and misinterpretation. The article shows how a good average response time can give worse results than a worse one.
This article does have some simple mathematics but this should not prevent the maths-unwashed from following it.
WHEN MAINFRAMES STOP
Skills in Demand
As mentioned before. the 'needed' skills will vary depending on which year you are looking at (not from). Those on this link are from 2Q 2022.
If you want other years, search using 'IT skills demand xxxx' where xxxx is your chosen year. You will then see why there is a constant emphasis throughout this website on 'General IT Education'.
The point made in these links is that the 'top' skills vary like the weather, either by mutation to another form or even obsolecence. Artificial intelligence (AI) accelerates this change.
The best way to ride these waves of change is to have a comprehensive knowledge of the IT landscape, kept current by lifelong learning. !
Planning for Change
We have seen the miserable success rate of IT projects and one factor which contributes to this is poor change management . The latter link is an ISO document and is joined by a shorter view below.