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On Specialization

Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein in Time Enough For Love.

I really enjoyed Ted Leung’s recap of the Surge 2011 conference. I don’t know squat about scalability matters, the purview of the DevOps community, but there was one quote from Leung’s recap that really struck me:

specialization is an industrial age notion and needs to be discounted in spaces where we operate at the boundary of the known versus unknown.

This was from Ben Fried, Google’s CIO, commenting on how his organization’s structure failed to solve a problem with a very complex system. Turns out no one could really understand the system from a global, end-to-end perspective, which was the key to solving the problem.

The quote really resonated, because on the day job I’ve been working on a team trying to strategically address a particularly thorny innovation challenge. Many of the technology components are known, and pairwise compositions well understood. But the unknown solution feels like it needs to emerge from a global, end-to-end perspective. If you agree with Fried, and I think I do, we’ll need some generalists to rise to the task.

And of course our company is chock full of stovepiped specialists.

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