By Martha McConaghy, SHARE® Director, Conference Operations
With 2017 behind us, there is a sense of relief. It was a challenging year for SHARE, for our industry, for nearly everyone. However, it was also an exciting one, with many innovations and opportunities. The first few weeks of 2018 have already shown that it will present many more to all of us. One thing that has remained consistent through all the turmoil, however, is SHARE’s mission to “Educate-Network-Influence.”
The fact that “Educate” is listed first in our mission is not an accident. It is one of the things that SHARE does best. Presentations at the semi-annual events have been my main source of technical education for most of my career. I’m sure that is true for most of our members. Still, after three decades, I learn something new at every SHARE event. Best of all, I also see new, young faces that belong to the next generation of mainframers, all of whom are doing the same thing. We may be separated by a cultural gap, but we all share the same desire to learn and to grow at something we love to do.
The key to SHARE’s education mission is the technical program presented at each event. Speakers and educators from nearly every area of our industry come together to share their expertise. What makes a SHARE event unique is the wide variety of subjects that are covered. In one day, you can hear about the latest mainframe hardware features, learn about basic security techniques used to protect your company’s data, and then sit down at a lab and configure a blockchain application. No other event provides you with so many opportunities to learn new skills while keeping up to date with the latest changes in existing technologies.
In the last few years, SHARE has purposefully worked to present subjects in the technical program that go beyond the traditional. It is important that we keep up with the changes in the industry and, in turn, help educate members and colleagues in these new technologies or practices. The DevOps project, for example, was created to focus on a movement that has had impact on nearly every organization, including ones running mainframes. Topics on the latest in security technologies have been the highlight of every event. From intrusion detection and prevention to the protection of data across the enterprise, SHARE has hosted important speakers covering both the challenges of today and tomorrow.
New application technologies are becoming available all the time for the mainframe environment, and SHARE’s technical program has led the way in providing training and education about them. Whether you seek information on how such topics as machine learning, CICS, RACF and hybrid cloud will impact your business, or need technical training on such things as Node.js, Swift, Angular, Express, Cobol and Java, the goal of our events is to provide a bit of something for everyone.
The credit for bringing such a rich and diverse technical program to every SHARE conference goes to the many volunteers who work so hard to build, organize and speak at our events. Twice a year, they create a small miracle, which brings people from around the world together to exchange information, gain new skills and create relationships. Every contribution, whether large or small, combines to make SHARE the unique organization and experience that it has been for over 60 years. It has been an honor to work with these dedicated people and to see how much their hard work has meant to the people who attend SHARE.
EDUCATE-NETWORK-INFLUENCE!