SHARE - 50 and still going strong

- Any time an organization celebrates a birthday, it's a chance both to take stock of the past and look to the future. As one of the world's oldest user groups, Share, turns 50, the current president stresses the body's continuing importance and its ongoing input into guiding the direction of IBM product development.

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Share was established back in 1955 as an independent, volunteer-run association, two years after IBM released its first computer. Share members number over 20,000 computing professionals drawn from the Fortune 500, academia, government bodies and the consulting community, while a network of more than 300 individuals help run the user group.

Robert Rosen is the current Share president. He is also chief information officer for the U.S. National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Arthritis, Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. Rosen chatted with IDG News Service Thursday about Share's past, present and future and the evolving nature of user groups. What follows is an edited transcript of that interview.

IDGNS: How far does your experience date back with Share and how has the organization changed over the years?

Rosen: My first Share meeting was in 1970. Share was much more related to the scientific environment then. The joke about Share used to be there'd be all technical people talking bits in different corners. If you asked 'What's the best way to organize my help desk?' people would look at you as if you came from Mars. But probably from the mid to late 70s [onwards], Share was also covering business issues too. The real difference back then was that when we talked to IBM it was very much down at the bit and byte level. Now, it's very much what's the business reason for this [product or feature]? Businesses are much more aware of how IT contributes to their bottom line.

In terms of the important role user groups play, people say it's all about keeping the vendor honest. I say 'Yes we do that,' but it's the relationship and the way we influence the vendor to produce the products we need that's a very positive thing.

IDGNS: And how has the relationship between Share and IBM altered?

Rosen: There are two sides to the coin. There have been ups and downs in the relationship, adversarial versus working together. It depended on which part of IBM you were dealing with. We always had pretty good relationships with the developers. At one point, IBM said 'Here's what we're planning to do in the next two years' and we had input into that. We still have that, but it's done in a different way through technical steering committees where the groups meet the whole weekend before Share with IBM and the meetings don't attract as much publicity [as in the past].

One big difference is that IBM has more ways to get [user] information. Back when I first started [with Share], when IBM came to a meeting, 80 percent of their customers would be there. Now IBM has customer councils, Web logs, a lot more sources of information. But one of the problems with getting information is that you need to validate it. How good is it? Who is this person, a crank or a CIO? Share offers a measure of quality of input.

IDGNS: What about attendance at Share?

Rosen: The attendance has been up and down. After 9/11 it was down some, but we've seen the trend reverse, it's flattened out and there's a bit of an increase. Share's still doing well, we've still got money in the bank. We still have a future.

We're expecting 2,500 to 3,000 attendees in Boston and we had about the same amount [at the Share meeting] in Anaheim in March. Most attendees will be from the U.S., but we do get a fair number of attendees from both Europe and Asia. For instance, 17 members of one of our sister user groups, Japan Guide/Share, will be coming to Boston. We're probably going to see more pickup from China where the mainframe market is growing more and more.

Share is still the place to go. It's the only place you can go where you can talk to people walking the talk. If you look at a scientific paper, they'll list experiments and why they were a success. What you never hear them saying is, 'Boy, that was a mistake. It didn't work.' You do hear that at Share. To me, in some sense, it's more valuable to hear about failures [than successes].

IDGNS: Where did the Share name come from?

Rosen: From the sharing of information. Share was never an acronym. We always say 'It's not an acronym, it's what we do.'