The Oracle Skills Risk
Last week, I was in Ukraine last week for Devoxx Ukraine 2019. I attended a number of sessions, spoke to a lot of people and gave my popular "Everything That's Wrong with IT" presentation.
I noticed that while a few people would grudgingly admit they were connecting to an Oracle database, nobody wanted to have anything to do with Oracle software if it could in any way be avoided.
Organizations running Oracle software tend to assume that everybody is. But they aren't, and they don't want to. That is going to become a problem as your Oracle Forms programmers, PL/SQL experts and Oracle Service Bus developers retire or move on to other things. There is no next generation learning these tools.
You need to decide which Oracle tools and technologies are strategic to you and formulate a plan.
For those Oracle technologies that are strategic, you need to figure out how to retain existing talent and train the next generation. It's not enough to give Joe a raise, ask him to live healthily and hope he doesn't retire for another few decades.
For those Oracle technologies that are not strategic, you need to figure out how to replace them with something sufficiently popular that you can get the developer and administration talent you need.
If you want to hear me speak about this topic in more detail, come to the German Oracle user group (DOAG) conference in Nürnberg in a few weeks. I'll be presenting "Untangling Yourself from Oracle" on Nov 21 at 10 a.m. in room Prag.
Best regards
Sten Vesterli
sten@vesterli.com