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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