A few weeks ago I had a student in class who was a very smart and experienced IT guy. During a discussion on a break he nostalgically mentioned that he missed the days when it was possible to know virtually everything in the world if IT. Those days have been gone for a long time but it was once fairly true; you could know almost everything. Things just weren’t as complex and intricate as they are today. Now, I know that what I am today calling complex will seem so simple and elementary in 10 years but for now each day is a new pinnacle.

My student’s comment got me thinking about something that I have carried around in my head since high school (e.g. just a tick under 20 years). I was a linebacker on my high school football team and one Friday night, while playing Garfield High School up in Northern Virginia something simple yet remarkable happened. Garfield was set to kickoff the ball and they were kicking into the wind. The kick was very high and very short. As I watched from the sidelines I saw my teammate run up under the ball and then, sensing the stampede of Garfield players coming towards him, decided he was going to let the ball hit the ground. He ran out of the way of the ball to avoid having it hit him. The ball hit the ground and rolled to a stop. My teammates as well as the Garfield players all began trotting off the field. One player on the Garfield side was acting weird. He continued to sprint toward the ball, knocking surprised players from both sides of the field out of the way in the process. In what appeared to be an idiotic moment he dove on top of the ball while everyone on the field sat and watched with a sense of curiosity …except the referee. After jumping on the ball the ref blew the whistle and then gave the signal to indicate that the ball was dead, and it was 1st and 10 for Garfield!!! My teammates reacted in protest and Garfield’s players, most of whom didn’t understand what had just happened, celebrated.

What did happen? On the field that night were 22 football players. One of them was a student of the game. He knew the rules and he knew how the game is played. He studied the game in every aspect and knew things that other players didn’t. In football a kickoff is different than a punt. After the ball goes 10 yards on a kickoff it is a live ball and anyone can retrieve it (in the NFL you can pick it up, but not in high school …at least when I was in high school). As a student of the game, he stood out. That guy, who I never knew, and that moment have been in my head for more than 20 years. I learned an important life lesson that night and I have applied it to my almost everything I do in life, Information Technology included.

I have to admit that it is no longer possible to know everything. I’m sad about it because there is so much really cool stuff going on in the world of IT today that I feel like I’m missing out on some really neat things. I just can’t keep up. None of us can. Having said that, you still have to be what the Garfield player was so many years ago: a student of the game. No, you don’t have to know everything but you do need to know something about everything. I have long since come to believe that the world of IT is analogous to the world of medicine. In the medical field your family doctor is a general practitioner, they know a little bit about a lot of things. When something comes up that is beyond their level of knowledge they refer you to a specialist. The specialist has a litte bit of knowledge about a lot of things but has a lot of knowledge about something specific. That is the direction the world of IT has gone …almost.

Many of us have become very specific in what we do. There are people who focus exclusively on switches (in the LAN), routers (in the WAN), the desktop OS and the servers on the backend. There are developers, database admins and security specialists. Security specializations have become so specific that some of us just focus on one aspect of security (IPS/IDS, firewalls, VPNs, etc.) Applications have become so big and feature rich that some of us specialize only in an app (Microsoft Exchange, for instance). The specialization we see today is cool and to some extent necessary. Again, things are much more involved than they once were. The problem I see is that we are consistently becoming too compartmentalized focused only on our part of the whole. That is a dangerous direction. Because things are becoming more and more distributed and internetworked it is no longer acceptable for you to only specialize on certain things. You have to become a student of the whole game, not just your position. If you are a firewall administrator you need to learn about database management and application development. You don’t have to be a rockstar, just don’t be an idiot. Read a book on programming; write a little code of your own. Learn how Active Directory works, explore Microsoft Exchange. Learn the fundamentals of 802.11 wireless LANs and how 802.11i helps to secure the wireless world. Develop a working knowledge of HTML and CSS. Learn a little bit about PHP and MySQL so you can appreciate the revolution they long ago created on the World Wide Web. Take some time to learn how XML and XSL are changing the world. It’s crazy what it can do. Even though these things don’t always apply directly to job responsibility you will find that you are better at what you do as a result. Become a student of the game. Learn new things. If you do, there will be more days where you are that 1 out of 22 that teaches us all something about the way things work.