The IT generalist makes a comeback

I’ve been seeing the title “IT generalist” coming back into use. It’s a welcome sight. I recall the generalist from the days when minicomputers and mainframes were being traded for less costly Unix microcomputers. Back then, the generalist was the one who had a functional understanding of the entire technical operation and many of the processes that depended on it. If you had a generalist, by any title, you may have him or her to thank for easing the transition from legacy to modernity.

The “mile wide and inch deep” description of the generalist is adequate to sketch the outline of the role but only as it relates to knowledge. Generalists earn their keep by shortening lengthy processes and working as impartial and trusted problem solvers.

Today’s IT generalist is the kind of person you’ll find running the technical side of a small business’s operations — a CTO, CIO, and datacenter manager rolled into one. If you ask the generalist why everyone’s computers are getting slower, he’s not going to call in consultants or write 2,000 lines of C code. He’ll have a handful of possibilities in mind, and in a day or two, he’ll find the culprit and formulate potential solutions. If you don’t like those particular options, rather than pout, he’ll recommend a stopgap while alternatives are being considered.

In a midsize business, the generalist is the staffer who gathers knowledge about technology implementation, planning, and use from all corners of the operation. He rinses off the politics and mentally correlates the discrete knowledge he’s gathered from inside — with a constantly refreshed knowledge of what’s available from the outside — into a total understanding of the operation that others don’t have time to gather.

Here’s an illustration. Let’s say that management tells IT to cut back on new storage acquisitions. IT will push back — it will be happy to do that if management agrees to stop growing the business, and the familiar tennis match with a ball of barbed wire begins. If management went to its generalist instead of IT with its concerns about rising storage costs, the generalist would know he could cut back on costs by educating the department heads who had no idea that storage was a finite and costly resource. The generalist would know that he could stem growth considerably by pushing the call center’s data to tape on a more aggressive schedule. He’d know that there’s a good chance that the XML data on which the order desk relied could be compressed without any impact on operations. The generalist would present the issue to everyone involved, individually, in terms they’d understand. In the end, each of the participants would submit their recommendations to IT as if they came up with them on their own. The storage reclamation would come off smoothly and incrementally, with no surprises, no edicts, and no infighting.

How can one person pull this off? The generalist has no turf to protect, no face to save, no axes to grind, and doesn’t aspire to anyone else’s job. His employer is smart enough to let him stay neutral and to let him work behind the scenes.

After a competent generalist comes on board, one by one, everybody starts doing their jobs better, and turf wars begin to calm. If you ask a generalist whether he’s responsible for that, he’ll tell you that you’ve assembled a great team.