IT landscape is changing very fast, Business and IT are getting integrated much deeper and wider than before. Business is looking at IT to help design new business strategy, optimize cost of operation, create unique user experience, heighten security, privacy & confidentiality, draw meaningful insight to enhance business proliferation, optimize bottom line and increase top line etc. At the same time technocrats are optimizing and innovating approaches to support business by integrating with business ecosystem with social media, developing advance analytics platform to build pattern & predicting model, enabling users with fast and easy application to access data and conduct job or carry out business transactions, creating secured environment to support BYOD, transforming the traditional infrastructure set up to more agile and cost effective cloud set up. Besides, Technocrats are getting more involved into business process and day to day operation to look for opportunities to automate process, help optimize business function. Research and Development departments are focusing into new ideas and solutions to create unique user experience, next generation solution to integrate things (IoT) with adequate processing power and less power requirement while conceiving FOG as a solution from CLOUD. ICAN is running out of standard 32 bit IPv4 modeled IP addresses to 128 bit IPv6 based IP addresses.
In the midst of all this how an IT professional, whether he/she is into network, MF, Linux Administration, application developer, Mobile engineer, protocol designer or project managers should update skill to stay connected with evolutions in almost all segments. Legacy systems are revamping and modernizing the set up (MF has been evolving from old MVS/OS in 70s to latest zEC/zBC 12 with over 5GHz of clock frequency and over 100 core processing unit) and continues to be in the race. New breed of technologies are making huge stride of innovation all across resorting all technical process to change either in the traditional DC or Cloud set up. We are moving from months of server or storage provisioning duration to minutes to seconds, All users need to do is to select few configurable items in the user interface and he/she gets a server, storage and compute of his choice.
In my opinion, IT landscape in this era and down the line would require less of specialist and more of generalists. Let us go down to some of the areas as below.
Networking: Couple of decade ago, A network engineer happened to be very specifics at his job function. He/She would have learned and developed better control on managing physical layer up to network layer, will need to exhibit the skill to configure network component and interfaces to mitigate the network signal attenuation while single line would have run for some distance.
Who is Network Engineer today or what it takes to become Network Engineer: SDN, DevOps, Integration of cloud computing? SMAC, IoT, SDN, Software culture etc. are reshaping the landscape and hence the role. Should a specialist be acquiring skill not only in N/W, but also in related and surrounding areas viz. Security, Systems, Storages and Software or Network Engineer Job role itself is going to broaden.
Job functions for a typical Network Engineer are expanding from prosaic provisioning frame relay link, cabling to integrating virtual environments, plotting SD-WAN links to writing codes also. Their new Job function will require them to get integrated deeper and wider in OS such as Wintel, Linux etc. though that wasn’t the requirement in the initial days. Network Engineer s have to know the surroundings such as servers, storage, OS/System, Protocol etc. in order to get Network component up and running in the cloud and/or shared environment. In the midst of IoT evolution and subsequent IPv6 implementation, network engineers role and skill will expand beyond network protocols, packets, frames, Syn/Ack etc.
Network engineers shall gradually be involved into data mining, Advance analytics by incorporating big data platform to enhance network behavior and improve QoS. This also helps in optimizing service delivery, minimizing security issues, optimizing capacity across internal IT and extended enterprise.
With the growing need of storage, DC space constraint, Complex operational management and increasing operation cost, increasing power consumption and cooling processing requirements, changing IT landscape to SDDC, evolution in SMAC & IoT space etc., the whole IT ecosystem is reshaping and undergoing huge transformation relative to business model, delivery structure and skill roadmap while putting enterprises to look for more generalists rather than specialists in multitude of domain viz. Network Eng., Clod Admin., Storage Admin., Automation Engineers etc.
System Administration: Unix, Linux, Wintel platform administration job activities are merging with cloud platform administration. Besides, Cloud administration is getting simpler and probably enterprise doesn’t require many people with deep specialization. Number of administrators can easily be reduced as well as that reduced set of people will be required to perform basic network tests, firewall configuration, hypervisor (ESX/ESXi etc.) management etc. The specialized role of a Linux/RedHat administrator starts getting transformed into more of surroundings while making him/her to generalist.
However, presence of specialist is not going to fade away, we would need people of troubleshoot the system if automation fails or heterogeneous set up sometime shows anomalies. MF Engineers will be required to carry out dump analysis if there is data corruption or aged old Cobol/PL/1 malfunctions on certain situations. MF back end data processing is not going to be replaced by any system in the foreseeable manner because it is relatively more secure, robust, scalable, multiprocessing, multi users, strong processing unit than most of the latest distributed platform, besides 60% of BFSI data is still residing and running in MF, Migration all that doesn’t give any strong CBA. This is an area that relatively requires greater number of specialists than generalists. This skill is scarce and can’t be easily shared or leveraged in Non MF department.
Let’s move from Infrastructure department to application department. Application programing landscape is changing very fast, we started developing business program using COBOL to efficient engineering language such as C, PL1, Pascal to OOP languages such as C++,JAVA to scripting and statistical language such as Perl, Python, R etc.. making us to realize to take programming skill as an art and the whole department is shifting towards more drag and drop environment such as Dreamweaver, WordPress as CMS etc. . These are being leveraged for web development. Instead of putting time and energy in learning HTML, CSS, JavaScript etc. , tools are available to make your application available in minutes to hours and make your business website up and running in hours rather than learning all components or hiring costly resources for doing so.
However, Generalists need to start with some specialization to peg himself in some area else he will be drowned and never be focused. A system administrator can start with Linux or Wintel administrator before becoming generalist in testing network switches or routers. Or a Web developer still needs to start with HTML, CSS and bit of Java coding before he would like to spread his arm around e-commerce development using Dreamweaver and MySQL DB.
This is the blog aimed at those who are past specialization in most of IT areas including Network, Storage, Cloud, Integration Management, Application Development Management, Security Engineers and many more to stretch themselves to start getting around adjoining components, yet some of the specialists would still be requirement with greater degree of insight and knowledge.