Never mind your cheese, I want to know what happened to the universe while I was not looking.

I distinctly recall numerous points in time over the duration of my career where I was suddenly struck by how dramatically my universe had changed.

In my personal context, my universe is the whole of the IT Development/IT Engineering space. And my universe has again been rocked by one of those OMG moments when I came up for air and looked around a bit.

Like most disciplines mine has been largely one of increasing specialization. As time goes by and new technologies emerge it is increasingly difficult to stay aware of, let alone abreast of, my field as a whole.

Buzzwords enter the lexicon, gain acceptance, are used in trade publications, then fade to obscurity before I ever know what they really meant.

Whole technologies have come into being, flourished, and gone before I ever became aware of them in some cases.

Two teams, working with the same technology, but isolated from each other, will develop an distinct shorthand both verbal and written, to describe the exact same things. Yet each group will find the other groups patter to be mostly unintelligible.

This balkanization and hyper specialization is especially prevalent in any tech based area of endeavor. Add to that the speed with which innovation is occurring throughout the world and you get a tsunami of tech washing over you daily.

There are people that make entire careers out of one module of a program like SAP. Or people that specialize in one vertical technology platform such as Biztalk, or Sharepoint for example.

And this is not necessarily by choice, rather it is being driven for the most part by sheer practical necessity.

Even people on the far right end of the bell curve are having to focus their attention on an ever decreasing slice of the available whole.

This is not in and of itself a "bad thing" but it is a phenomena that has serious potential implications for both business and society as a whole.

From a slightly different perspective we in the IT world are following in the footsteps of the Medical profession. Yet we in IT have already exceeded the degree of sub specialization that the Medical field has obtained.

Some of us can remember when a medical "specialist" was a fairly rare thing. They were typically available in the handful of large hospitals and research institutions that could afford to support them and their particular demands on the infrastructure of the day.

Now I routinely see specialists as needed, and have a choice of dozens if not hundreds of specialists in any given field, in my own hometown. General Practitioners still exist, and they fill an increasingly vital role.

A good GP is a person that can help you plan your overall healthcare approach and needs. They act as the central clearing house with both a big picture view of you and your health as well as a detailed view of specific areas of interest.

They help you decide if a specialist is needed, which one to use, and they keep track of all of the resulting diagnostic information and integrate it into an overall view of your health.

So is there an analog to a medical GP in the IT world? Should there be? What role would an ITGP play?

I have my own opinion which I will share in a follow up post, but I would like to hear your opinions as well.

Cheers,

Robert Porter