The IT Generalist
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The role of the IT Generalist is one that is difficult to understand and almost impossible to label and often gets a bad reputation, although no one is sure why. In some ways, one could consider that an IT Generalist is really an IT Discipline of its own, although it is more a way of approaching IT.
The generalist is a position that has experience in many or all other IT disciplines and applies them holistically to a single job. Like other IT disciplines, the generalist exists at nearly all "levels" of IT and can be entry level and, unlike specialist roles, goes all the way to the top of the field, to CIO and architect roles. Generalists run the technical career gamut of the field.
Generalists exist in every size and type of company, and are essentially always required. A generalist, by definition, can be used anywhere in an organization, but are most useful functioning as the "glue" that puts other roles together. A dedicated network person will have little useful input into interacting with databases. A systems person will not know much about the applications. And so on. Someone needs to take these pieces and combine them into a functional environment and that is the key role of the generalist.
In the enterprise space, we tend to see generalists having arisen after having spent time in several different specialist disciplines over the course of their careers. Roles like architect and CIO generally mean many year and deep skill levels all over the organization. It can be very difficult to find generalist roles beneath these very senior levels as these generalists, most often, as created out of coss-domain specialists who seek out the opportunity to move laterally throughout their careers.
Those familiar with the 1986 video game The Bard's Tale could think of the senior generalists role much like the archmage who, in order to achieve such a status, must work through the four other class types first.
In the SMB world, there are rarely any positions except those of the generalist. In a small business we expect, even in companies with several IT staff members, that people will cover storage, systems, networking, deskside support, desktop support, helpdesk, databases, many specific applicaions (ERP, CRM, email, telephony and more) and the list goes on. Only rarely does someone in the SMB space have a chance to even minimally focus on a single discipline area - there are simply too many hats to be worn. It's common for companies in the SMB space to give titles from the specialist world whether out of ignorance or a desire to make SMB jobs "sound" like enterprise ones but these titles are generally misplaces and pretty obviously do not reflect the day to day task realities of the SMB generalist.
The generalist is a critical role, both in the places that it holds throughout the IT industry, and as a difficult one requiring many different skills and rarely time to focus on any single one. It can also be very flexible and rewarding.
