The rise of the IT Generalist | usagoldmines.com

Information technology is evolving toward a goal of frictionless IT, in which IT teams automate as many processes as possible to embrace change and quickly adopt new technologies and SaaS apps. Greasing the wheels toward this trend, tech services are becoming faster to install and easier to use, right out of the box.

In the past, members of IT teams usually had to become experts in all things IT. But now that IT tools are much improved and more intuitive to use, people no longer have to be experts in how to run them all. We can think of this trend as the rise of the IT generalist, which often happens to processes and services as they become commoditized. The generalist is the equivalent of a product that gets commodified – it just works intuitively without instructions, providing all the tools that users need at their fingertips. The IT generalist can quickly get things going without any need to read a manual or complete a training.

Over time, the user has become more sophisticated. Each new generation that joins the workforce is more exposed to online activities than those who came before. The kids today are practically born with an iPad in their hands, and they intuitively know how it works. Yet even given that level of technical sophistication, it should not be the user’s responsibility to fix their IT devices and services when things go wrong.

IT generalists must work to simplify self-diagnosis for troubleshooting, while automatically providing solutions without users needing to understand how things work under the covers. In some cases, the problem in the middle may not be a laptop issue, it’s a website issue. Or sometimes CPUs need to be turned off before certain processes will enable Zoom to work when other services go down. We want an ability to proactively solve these kinds of problems for users without their knowledge.

Industry evidence points to a shortage of skilled IT professionals, while those on staff are too busy putting out fires to research the latest technologies or develop new IT skills. By 2026, more than 90% of organizations worldwide will feel the pain of this IT skills crisis, resulting in $5.5 trillion in losses caused by product delays, impaired competitiveness, and loss of business, according to estimates by IDC. The solution to this talent gap involves increased automation of network management tools and cloud software delivery, thus elevating IT pros to a more strategic role within their organizations.

Getting a handle on IT tool sprawl

IT leaders are responsible for running and repairing IT networks, software, and hardware. Faced with tight budgets and talent shortages, IT teams need to streamline their use of tools to deliver a more consistent end-user experience. But they are confronted with a new post-pandemic reality due to the shift to a remote workforce that runs countless apps on personal devices over external cellular networks. Any downtime or performance glitches can greatly limit business productivity, causing even more need for automation.

Tool sprawl presents a big problem due to added layers of complexity that can challenge even the most skilled IT pros. Nearly half of IT professionals (44%) today work with at least ten or more network-related tools, according to the Auvik IT Trends 2024 Industry Report. The most common team structure is half remote and half onsite, according to 40% of survey respondents. Larger companies are more likely to engage in network automation activities, while small organizations have either fully-remote or fully onsite workforces, rather than a blend of both. As expected, the tech and IT industries were more likely to be fully remote, while healthcare was more likely to be 100% on-site.

IT teams and system administrators need to work harder just to keep up these days, and the growth of AI will only increase their workload in the years ahead. Taken in this context, the rise of the IT generalist is a function of the tech industry’s larger evolution based on the prevalence of SaaS applications and cloud-based services. The cloud architecture simplifies processes for end-users, allowing non-experts to spin up new instances in the cloud and get right to work. As a result, the shift to remote and hybrid work has increased the importance of IT for business productivity.

Although the frictionless IT approach works well for many small and midsize businesses, it remains harder to pull off for large enterprises such as banks and financial institutions. Those kinds of complex, highly secure organizations still require specialists with a mastery of custom on-premise solutions that have been uniquely developed and integrated over time.

For most other industries, supporting the rise of the IT generalist can free up network administrators and IT teams to do much more with fewer resources. By being proactive across the entire technology stack, generalists can react faster and be more responsive to user needs without requiring a broad technical mastery of every technology.

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