Would you send your mother to a generalist for open heart surgery?

I was speaking with a colleague last week who had recently lost a valued employee that managed the company’s SANs.    He felt exposed.   This wasn’t the first time he had lost employees who were specialists.   He was thinking that the solution was to hire only generalists and give them on the job training on the many disciplines that one must manage in an IT environment – network, security, SAN, virtualization, Windows admin, Linux admin, monitoring, some DBA skills, scripting, and each of the flavors of vendor solutions of each of these disciplines.  

Cost and transiency

The core of the issue that he faced is that a specialist may be the one that will save your mother’s life if she needs a heart valve replacement, but specialists they cost more than general practitioners.  And finding the right one that wants to live or work in your location may be difficult.   What’s more, many only want to do open heart surgery and if you want them to treat your mother’s arthritis, they may look for another job.

Tactical vs. Big bang outsourcing to the rescue?

While we may all need medical specialists from time to time, we do not consider hiring one as a full time employee.   We outsource.  Since we may not need a continuous relationship with a specific medical specialist, we don’t often interview his/her partners when we are looking for one.  This is tactical outsourcing.   It makes sense for one-off needs.   Hopefully, your mother doesn’t need more than one heart valve replacement.   In California, where we have Kaiser Permanente, we can consider outsourcing all of our medical needs to a single organization.   There are options to do this in IT also.   This Big Bang outsourcing  is a big decision with big risk and significant transition requirements.

The targeted managed service option

The Internet allows diligent workers or service providers with good process and tools to work anywhere at any time for anyone.   I can recommend great managed service providers for DBA services, for JD Edwards CNC services etc.   I think of this as targeted managed services.   The benefit of this approach is that one can get a guaranteed supply of specialized resource that is shared with other customers at a cost that can be less than a full time employee.   

At T3 Dynamics, we are launching a new SaaS and managed service offering for enterprise end-to-end monitoring.   Please let me know if you want to join the no-charge beta offering.