The “IT Generalist” is gaining ground!
Why generalists are gaining favor in cash-strapped IT departments.
By Greg Shields
Sometimes, building your team of IT professionals can be best accomplished by aiming wide rather than going deep.
This was the topic of a recent eye-opening discussion I had with Jeff Galina, CIO of Mortgage Cadence Inc. Mortgage Cadence is a midsize company in Denver that specializes in creating software for the mortgage loan industry.
“Sometimes, instead of hiring on-staff IT professionals that are super-deep in one particular area [such as a Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) or Microsoft Certified Architect], it can be more cost-effective to hire a generalist who is more well-rounded in multiple technology areas,” Galina suggests. “Then, you can buy vendor-support contracts for those rare times when you need to augment their experience with deep knowledge.”
This statement struck me as particularly insightful considering today’s economy, and it reveals a current state in our industry with which we Windows insiders must come to grips. Many parts of our industry are moving away from the need for deeply technical talent in necessary but outwardly arcane technologies. Operation of highly critical services like e-mail messaging, voice mail and even databases and file services can now be offloaded to “the cloud” with a reasonable level of security and privacy. Leveraging economies of scale, those cloud providers can incorporate greater levels of availability for critical services than an individual business typically would be able to offer in-house. Sensitive data can also be offloaded to other companies for management, freeing businesses to focus on what they do best: running the business.
Galina adds: “Depending on your business and its size, there can be an IT operations model for hiring the jack-of-all-trades [JOAT] IT professional rather than the specialist. In fact, sometimes hiring a team of IT generalists can be a better idea than hiring specialists.”
He notes a recurring theme in his own 15 years of consulting experience, during which he’s assisted numerous small to midsize businesses (SMBs). In his experience, companies that have invested in teams of broad-based generalists have a tendency to
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Upcoming Small Business Server in 2010 or 2011
(This information is from the Microsoft SMB Blog…)
Microsoft on Monday announced two new “previews” to come for its Windows Small Business Server (SBS) product suite.
The previews, which aren’t yet publicly available, are code-named “SBS 7″ and “SBS Aurora.” The announcements, which will likely interest Microsoft partners serving the IT needs of smaller businesses.
SBS 7 is designed to support 75 users max, so there’s no real change in capacity from SBS 2008, the currently available all 64-bit product that rolled out in November 2008. However, Microsoft is planning to upgrade all of the components in SBS 7 to reflect its current product stack of server technologies. SBS 7 will include “Windows Server 2008 R2, Exchange Server 2010 SP1, SharePoint 2010 Foundation, Windows Server Update Services 3.0 and SQL Server 2008 R2,” according to the blog. SBS 7 will support employees with “file-and-print, email and Internet services,” plus Microsoft is adding management and security improvements.
SBS Aurora, on the other hand, will support 25 users max, enabling remote data access. Microsoft is describing it as a “first server” option for small businesses. What’s more, SBS Aurora is described as “the company’s first [server suite] to deliver both traditional and cloud capabilities,” according to the blog. Apparently, what that means is that SBS Aurora will be available for on premises installs or accessed as a service, or it will provide access to services (it’s not really clear from Microsoft’s blog post). SBS Aurora also will feature automatic backup and restore capabilities and will enable file and print sharing.
Does the Cloud still look comfy?
By Ivan Schneider
Courtesy of InformationWeek
Leading industry experts respond to gripes that IT professionals have about the security, cost, and portability of cloud computing in the enterprise.
As the popularity of cloud computing is taking off, so have questions and complaints from IT professionals who are using — or considering moving to — the cloud. Industry leaders answer some of the main concerns that they hear from IT staff about the cloud.
Gripe #1: “Wait, this isn’t really infinite, is it?”
One of the big draws of cloud computing is the ability to start small and then go big at a moment’s notice. But this elasticity should not be mistaken for infinity.
“It seems infinite, but it absolutely is not infinite,” says Imad Mouline, CTO of Gomez, the web performance division of Compuware. “In some circumstances, you may not be able to get the instance that you want, the data center or availability zone that you want, or the kind of instance that you want.”
You may be exposed to operational risk if your business depends upon being able to provision any level of cloud resources at a moment’s notice. “Are you willing to bet your business on it?” asks Mouline. “Or are you taking a chance that on the day that you need to ramp up that you’ll have the capacity and that you’ll get to it quickly, in hours instead of days?”
If several heavy users of cloud services simultaneously have the same idea to scale up, you may end up
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Dell… really? You’ve got to be kidding me!
I’m sure many of you have by now heard that Dell finally had to fess up that they shipped about 12 million faulty Optiplex desktops to businesses between 2003-2005. There were faulty capacitors, and many other motherboard components in those PCs. They new about it all along and even instructed their CS reps not to acknowledge any widespread issues (which there were hundreds of thousands) and shoot down any talk of it. Some of their enterprise customers were WalMart, University of Texas, Well Fargo, The Mayo Clinic, and many other small businesses. They actually had the nerve to tell customers that they were stressing the machines with too much work leading them to up selling more expensive machines.
After repairing PCs and Laptops throughout the years, I’ve learned that I will not buy a Dell or HP laptop for the simple fact that their quality has declined since 2004. HP laptops have been known to overheat since 2006 and Dell laptops are made of shoddy materials. I must say that Dell’s Latitude Business Line of laptops aren’t so bad, but I’ll go the route of Lenovo, Acer, and even ASUS for laptops these days.
Next time you buy a PC from Dell, make sure you add the extra warranty protection. I know it might offset the great price of the PC but you will sleep easy knowing that they will replace anything that goes wrong with it.