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IT Trends toward Generalists

In prosperous times, the hallmark of company IT departments was specialization. Companies could afford to hire specialists in areas such as network administration, systems administration, training, and web site development. Specialization offered a number of advantages to both company and workers, such as increased levels of expertise in specific areas that led to faster, easier troubleshooting and problem solving, less reinventing the wheel, and greater job security by virtue of the fact that workers in specialized niches knew that they could not be easily replaced. With the downturn in the economy, however, specialization was displaced by a new trend toward the development of IT generalists who could fill several diverse roles instead of just one very specific one. Former IT specialists have now adapted and expanded the scope of their jobs to become IT generalists. Companies could no longer afford to keep a full complement of specialists on board, so specialists had to diversify their expertise and become conversant with whatever other roles needed to be filled. This trend has brought with it a number of advantages and disadvantages that have changed the face of IT today.

Merali (2008, p. 285) points out that "The services science agenda is essentially a trans-disciplinary one, borne of the network economy." She asserts that we expect IT to deliver "flexibility, customization and responsiveness of service provision" and that this creates challenges for IT in terms of being able to strategize, organize, and transform the organization to support these expectations (Merali, 2008, p. 285). Nilsson (2010, p. 540) identifies "employability" as including not only the ability to find a job but also the ability to stay employed. His study found that "hard formal and technical vocational skills are considered to be of declining importance...less important in relation to one's individual

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IT Trends toward Generalists. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 19:52, July 03, 2025, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2001723.html