Highly specific skill sets

 IT staff in too many enterprises are employed rather like corkscrews, spiraling deep into a specialty and embedding themselves there. They are not treated as people capable of learning and performing multiple functions.
This concentration of specialists is part of a gradual evolution that has led to IT teams whose costs are top-heavy with personnel who have highly specific and generally under-used skill sets. Without intending it, both CIOs and the IT personnel working in their shops are effectively conspiring to enact mind-numbingly narrow job definitions, relegating personnel to just one task, even as they work with digital technologies.
Yet these same teams are often under-built at the generalist level, where multiple work functions could be handled – if only the tools available to IT allowed it. An inflexible IT department not only limits what IT can do for the enterprise, but also can limit career growth for the IT specialists themselves: a classic lose-lose proposition.
IT Faces Dramatic Changes
Why has this happened? When technology was sold and run in silos, the corkscrew approach to staffing was the only way. And it worked – the hard way. Specialists who understood a specific system in depth were rewarded at the expense of more agile and versatile generalists. Today’s IT departments, however, must deal with situations that are changing dramatically. IT requirements for such things as managing a supply chain, or managing internal and external services, are not going to be met with silos of limited, inflexible legacy products.
New tools now appearing in the market are cloud-based, open, efficient and easy to use. IT departments are most affected by these new tools, and within the departments, those most affected by them are the specialists trained on legacy tools. As the older tools disappear, so too will their jobs.
Many IT departments are feeling threatened, and some are going through denial. “We’ve always done business with these tools,” they think. “We’ve weathered storms like this before. We can weather this one.”  Denial, however, is hope’s desperate cousin – and never an effective business strategy.
The convergence of multiple factors– the move from siloed tools to cloud-based solutions, the simplification and broadening of IT management tools, and the ability to supplement resources by accessing service providers in the cloud – is having far-reaching effects. With vendors introducing solutions developed for generalists and their level of understanding, technology teams are changing, starting to be comprised of generalists rather than IT specialists.