New course teaches "ancient art" of (IT) application management

Starting this fall, applications support and maintenance company (and my client) RIS will be teaching a course on Applications Support and Maintenance (ASM) as a continuing education course at Ryerson University.

ASM is the part of IT that deals with supporting, maintaining and upgrading companies’ existing, installed base of computer applications. And what's really interesting about it is that ASM knowledge and expertise is at risk of evaporating in the next decade as a result of an aging workforce.

You see, many companies today - banks being a primary example - still rely very much on legacy or mainframe applications and computer systems that were built 20...or event 30 years ago. Even if the people who developed them were only 20 at the time, that means they'll be hitting retirement soon, and likely aren't doing hands-on IT support now anyways.

As always, much of the demographic shift has to do with the baby boomers. This year the first of them are reaching age 60. In 2015 the effects will be more profound with the peak of the boomers reaching age 65.

So if if some of the banks' most important IT systems are 30 years old, and the people who know their inner workings are soon going to be long gone, who's going to know how to keep them running? As RIS puts it in their news release about the course, learning the "ancient art" of ASM makes a lot of sense.