The Four Hundred

As we have learned in the first four articles in this special series on the state of the nation's OS/400 user groups, the groups are not going away. Despite the poor economy, IBM's "strategic" positioning of the platform, the advent of virtual meeting rooms over the Web, and the aging installed base, the OS/400 user group phenomenon has momentum to carry. If anybody is telling you the sky is falling, make sure he's donning a hardhat before making any moves yourself.

The 95 or so independent organizations that serve users of the OS/400 platform in regions across the North American continent have much going for them. While anecdotal evidence shows that user group membership, attendance, and participation is slowly dropping overall, many groups are in excellent financial shape, and have strong leaders who have been associated with their group for years, if not decades. Additionally, the groups have a history of providing a gathering place for probably the most dedicated group of users the business computing world has ever seen. That in itself is something the growing number of WebSphere user groups popping up across the country will likely never experience.

As we indicated in the first article in this series, the basic premise of the OS/400 user group is still intact. After sitting in front of a display monitor all day, OS/400 types often don't want to use their Web browsers to search out camaraderie. They would much rather have face-to-face contact with a trusted colleague of the platform or get a chance to meet, with good-old actual physical presence, a new speaker, than lurk among the anonymity of the Internet in an online forum. "What you can offer by bringing in a speaker, to me, is much more valuable than something you can pull off the Web," Kristine Hudnut, president of the Midrange Users of Mid-Michigan, or MUMM, told us. "It's so much easier when you can communicate with another human being."

The secret sauce that keeps OS/400 users coming back to the platform is, without question, education. In part 2 of this series, we took a closer look at the educational offerings of the user groups and how they are changing. The basic recipe for the user groups, which is to hold monthly meetings, where an OS/400 expert teaches you something new or useful about the platform, is still de rigueur. Sure, many groups, including MUMM, have adapted this basic approach by cutting down on the number of monthly meetings held throughout the year and making each meeting longer, in order to provide higher quality, more in-depth education on a particular topic. And some of the larger groups continue to find success with regional mini-conferences, replete with vendor expos. But if you separate education from the mix and tried to get by on the other benefits that user groups offer—networking for job opportunities, vendor product demonstrations, opportunities to gossip, newsletters, free pizza—a group's goals, its raison d'être, would start to fizzle.

A dark cloud appears on the horizon for OS/400 user groups when one considers the movement of people on and off the platform. Namely, there are few young operators, programmers, or managers stepping up to fill the shoes of those leaving the platform. The prototypical OS/400 user from the late 1980s or early 1990s was a single man who could move around the country to take the best job. Now that prototypical user has a family and has put down roots in a town. He has been a regular attendee of the user group and may have even attended COMMON. Right now, he is probably in the prime of his career. His skills, especially if he has learned new Web technologies, are in great demand, and he's making more money now than ever before. But if you look at the faces in the user groups today, there are few who are where this man was 10 years ago. The simple fact is that young programmers coming out of college or off their first job are not drawn to the OS/400 platform, and this has caused a general aging of the installed base. This lack of young blood has also contributed to the chronic shortage of people who are willing to contribute their energy and time as a leader of their user group, as we discussed in part 3.

In part 4, we took a look at how the relationship between local user groups and COMMON has changed over the last three years. COMMON, which is the granddaddy user group of them all, with 23,000 OS/400 professionals as members, used to take a bit of a high-and-mighty approach to dealing with the other user groups, but that is starting to change. Today, COMMON is reaching out to the user groups by giving them controlled access to mailing lists of COMMON members in their local areas, by hosting a Speaker's Bureau for user groups that lists OS/400 speaker topics and availability, and by writing a monthly column for their newsletters.

COMMON has other projects going that should be of interest to user groups as well. For example, the group is trying to bring back the Global Top Concerns survey, which is a program in which COMMON participates with local user groups to provide IBM with input about the direction the OS/400 platform should take. According to the COMMON Web site, the first batch of Global Top Concerns surveys since 1998 has been turned in, and we should be hearing about them soon. COMMON also has affiliation with another user-group-type organization: the iSeries Nation. For the last year and a half, the iNation has held its Town Hall Meeting during the COMMON conference.

While the Global Top Concerns program is a step in the right direction, as things stand now, the local user groups have little visible effect on the decisions of COMMON, and almost no voice with the iNation. COMMON is a great resource for in-depth education, and its bi-annual conferences continue to be the top draw in the OS/400 market, although users are increasingly turning to the IBM Technical Conference, the Education Connection held in south Florida every June, and the regional mini-conferences held by larger user groups for education.

Let's revisit the baseball analogy that was used in part 4 of this series. If COMMON is the major-league baseball team, then the 95 or so user groups around the country are its minor league teams, its farm system. But this has got to be one of the biggest farm systems in existence, something only the New York Yankees or the Los Angeles Dodgers would have the resources to put together. The problem is, most of these user groups are currently operating at the Class A level, and COMMON doesn't have the power to lift them up to Class AA or AAA ball. The groups are maintaining their status quo—some happily, some not so happily—but as they lose members, as almost all are, they're losing their most valuable resources. COMMON can't give them the attention they need to grow and prosper, because they would have 90-some odd other groups to take care of, too.

Is the time right to establish a national league for these valuable OS/400 resources, the user groups? Or perhaps a set of four or five regional leagues around the country? Such a league could provide user groups with services not being fulfilled by COMMON and the iNation. By harnessing the resources of all of the user groups, the league would have the capacity to think on a large scale but act appropriately through its user groups on a local scale. Some might call this "thinking globally but acting locally." The time might be right for a federation of all OS/400 user groups. There has to be some way for user groups, from the smallest one on up to COMMON, to work more closely together to coordinate the use of valuable and scarce resources—time, money, speakers, educational materials, and user group members—to forward the cause of the OS/400 platform and the OS/400 manager, programmer, and administrator.

Let us know what you think about this declaration of dependence by sending us an e-mail.