IT Specialization

As I continue to look for contracting work in the current down economy, I am struck by how specialized IT functions have become in most businesses. The job boards continue to have jobs with specific skillset requirements. Personally, I think looking for specific and narrow specialized skillsets is a mistake anytime and is more of a mistake in a down economy, since it is possible to get folks with a more diverse set of skills which can perform multiple functions in an organization. And even if the job does not require a cross-functional role, it is very useful to have people how have an understanding of the other IT silos prevalent in most organizations.

Think of it this way - there are quite a number of highly skilled technologists out there looking for work who have a broad range of experience in IT organizations. Their skillset crosses narrow specializations. My own skillsets fall into a number of categories. For example I have designed large scale Unix server for an ASP. On the other hand I have managed smaller scale Linux systems for startup companies. I have managed a service support organization and done consulting across a broad range of IT areas including network design, network service design (e.g. DNS, email, web application servers, authentication), database design and programming, network tools programming, Unix/Linux administration, storage administration, network administration, network monitoring, network security, etc. I have even ventured into application development and deployment infrastructure design and management. This is mostly due to the fact that keeping the sources to even administration scripts separate from the deployed production systems was hammered into my head early on in my experience. Source code control is a way of keeping track of all the small changes system administrators make to systems. I have even used source code control to manage Cisco router configurations and firewall ACLs.

The reason I ended up with experience across this broad swath of what I would call Internet related services is I was doing professional Internet related work before all the specialization came about with the growth of the Internet and the growth of corporate intranets based around TCP/IP. I have a hard time conceiving of a world where the piece parts of an Internet based service model are kept separated.

This siloing has some unfortunate side effects. One effect is it is difficult to do troubleshooting when something goes wrong and it requires getting a lot of people together to sort out the problem and work down to the root cause. For example is an application problem a network issue (e.g. bad routing table, router down, etc) or is it a network security issue (port not open, firewall misconfigured). Or is it a naming problem. e.g. DNS lookups are failing. Doing troubleshooting in a complex network environment is hard enough. Adding the communications requirements across siloed groups magnifies the difficulty. The problem gets worse with the tendency to point fingers at another group or another part of the infrastructure when something goes wrong. e.g. the management and therefore the ownership of the overall infrastructure is diffuse.

Another effect of the siloing is few if any people in the organization have a clear view of how all the infrastructure pieces relate to one another. There is no clear map of the entire system. With siloed expertise it is often the case that a change in one silo drastically affects another silo because no one understands the interfaces between the silos. Hiring folks that have a more general understanding of the entire infrastructure can avoid these types of mishaps.

Personally, I would go a step further and eliminate the silos. Rather than silo around a specific technology, I would ideally put operational staff in a single infrastructure support group and create cross-functional teams which spans the entire infrastructure. A primary goal of each team would be to train its members in the various infrastructure pieces. A result of this team approach would be a reduction in knowledge silos. A management challenge of this sort of approach is to get the operational personnel to give up their proprietary and often destructive ownership of their piece of the infrastructure.