Specialists vs Jack of all Trades

I am a big proponent of having a lot of knowledge about various technologies rather than be specialized in one particular area. When I set up an IT staff, I want people that can do multiple things and be flexible in terms of coverage. This allows you to hire less people but get more done. To me, this has been pretty much common sense. Unfortunately, larger organizations have focused on hiring many specialists that do one thing very well which is horribly inefficient. At some of my previous jobs, there were IT staffs of over 1000 people that seemed to never get anything done. The best IT staffs I worked on were of less than 10 people where a weak link was singled out very quickly and dealt with. In these types of staffs you can see where you are weak and make adjustments very quickly. In large organizations it is easy to hide amongst the masses when you basically do nothing to contribute to the overall IT team.

A good article about this topic came up at Interop and I want to share it here with you:

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/052009-interop-job-skills.html?fsrc=netflash-rss