Someone sent me a column by computer-industry consultant Kathleen Dollard about the pace of change. It started me thinking that there are two great forces that are going to impact our industry. The first is the rate of change in technology. The second is more subtle but just as important — the rate of retirements in our industry. Over the next ten years, our industry will look very different.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil postulates that the rate of change over the next 100 years will be more like 20,000 years of change. We can look at the rapid-version histories of Java and the .NET Framework as examples of the rate of change. New technologies are going to burst on the scene, and we'll need to embrace them. Sometimes external events like September 11 force us to embrace change. In the old days, we all knew the guy who knew every line of code in a particular system written in COBOL or RPGIII. That guy is gone, replaced by teams using several different languages.

If we look at the population changes of the professionals, we can expect that over the next 20 years, a generation will be retiring. Those of us who have been around awhile all know someone who has retired or will retire soon. Companies are starting to appreciate the issue. They are changing policies to encourage people to work longer.

To some extent, the fact that we serve a conservative client base will mediate the need to adopt new technologies. We as professionals should recognize that we'll need to learn new and varied technologies. Our clients will be looking for companies that have experts and can retain them.

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