| Part of the road map to autonomic success will be the acceptance by all IT staff of the introduction of this new technology. To some, it will be a threat. Others will embrace it with almost religious zeal. To overcome these difficulties, IT senior staff must address the concerns of their subordinates. At least three obstacles to acceptance of autonomic technology spring to mind: -
Job security concerns -
Technology maturity -
Concerns over creating further IT instability To many data center and operations staff, the promise of full automation and a lights out environment is not new. Many technologies, such as artificial intelligence, case-based reasoning, and rules engines, have promised full automation capabilities. The success rates have been questionable, and many of these technologies have contributed to the overall complexity problem faced in IT architectures today. These are some of the reasons why IT staffers are likely to be skeptical. Essentially it is a cultural problem whether these obstacles can be eliminated or minimized. Senior IT corporate management must introduce autonomic computing that meets the needs of the corporation. This IT culture problem is not new. Its roots go back over 20 years. In the early 1980s, I conducted research over a three-year period into improved design methods and higher levels of application development automation. At that time, applications were created over months and years with languages such as COBOL/PL/1 and others. There was a need to design and implement new languages, systems, and design techniques to allow applications to be constructed in days. This research was integrated into a book Application Development Without Programmers by James Martin.[1] The book started many trends that resulted in higher productivity, such as fourth generation languages (4GLs), the whole Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) era, and eventually Rapid Application Development (RAD) techniques. All of these technologies greatly improved the productivity of application development. Part of this research concentrated on IT staff and their attitudes toward this new technology. We found that there were major obstacles in terms of resistance to new automation technologies. Some examples of the issues were: -
Conservative IT staff refusing to believe that any new technology is better than the one they are currently using. -
Introducing newer technologies frequently led to further problems. -
IT staff, fearful for their jobs, denigrating new facilities and methods. -
Sentiment existing against pioneering, as pioneers end up dead. These were the attitudes of IT staff over 20 years ago. While the technology has improved by several orders of magnitude, some of these obstacles to progress have not. It is important that autonomic implementation plans address these issues early on with good communication on progress, plans, issues, and goals. Only then will full implementation be pursued. One factor that should be communicated clearly to all IT staff is that the full implementation of autonomic computing cannot be introduced quickly. It will take time to move through the five levels towards full autonomic capability. | 
