Later this month I’m presenting at an event on changes to the IT department and I’m going to focus on the collapse of the silos, or division of labour, in IT.

As part of my research I have one eye on the current state of IT silos and the other eye on the theories of Karl Marx.

Marx: Increasing the specialisation may also lead to workers with poorer overall skills and a lack of enthusiasm for their work = Alienation

Just focused on Windows?  Just focused on Mainframe?  Just focused on VMware and not Citrix?  Just an EMC Storage geek and hate NetApp?  If so then you, my friend, are on a downward trajectory and taking your employer with you.

Marx: With this division of labour the worker is depressed spiritually and physically to the condition of a machine

Stuck in a specific position in the application or server or project deployment lifecycle?  Are you the girl maintaining the IP address spreadsheet?  Or are you the guy doing the fibre-channel zoning for every new boot-from-SAN server?

This is the IT silo from across the centuries.  Plato talked about this in 4th century BC when referring to farmers, builders and weavers.  Over 2000 years later, Adam Smith talked about specialisation leading to “mental mutiliation” in workers.  In the 21st century the technology-agnostic ITIL process weavers want to do the same things to you.

Where this all gets really interesting is the modern debate that none of this has been unconscious: we fall into our jobs by sometimes trying something new, but mostly just floating along with the current.

Virtualization is stalled @ 20%.  Clouds are scoffed at.  Unified fabric is abused by pipe carving into four static channels.  Progress?

Perhaps Douglas Adams was right.

Related posts:

  1. IT Departments and the Collapse of the Silos