Why you need to hire IT generalists

Much has been said over the past several years about the need for CIOs to transform IT — to go from keeping the lights on to being a strategic partner for the business. The root of that transformation is a cultural change that starts with how you think about staffing your organization, says ExtraHop CIO John Matthews.

"IT has changed a lot in the last 15 years," Matthews says. "When I was first coming up, technologies were so siloed. It wasn't an emotional siloing; they were actually siloed."

"Take data networks and phone systems," he adds. "The phone and the network were profoundly separate things when I first began. Over the years, it's become one thing and there are a lot of challenges associated with that. Look at dropped packets. That's fine in networking, but in voice the human ear hears that kind of chatter. Networks had to be designed differently to accommodate voice. That's happening across all of IT."

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