As much as possible we like to spread around knowledge so even the deepest and most valuable technical specialists on staff get to take an occasional vacation or go on a course. I am often taken to task by business areas as to why we do not have more than one technical specialist covering off every application and function that we support.
My standard answer is that for very technical things a person has to be working on it every day to maintain the required knowledge at their finger tips and that it may take years to become an expert in a very narrow but deep field. So in many cases where there is not sufficient work to keep more than one person current what we have is one expert backed up by other experts who can do the routine things to keep production running. Work that requires expert level knowledge such as structural changes to a proprietary in house developed complex system wait for the expert to return from vacation. So I think that in many cases it is the nature of the very specialized work that builds the silos of knowledge as opposed to how many staff are available.
To summarize, basic knowledge is shared, with each person been the resident “Expert” on a few items.
I am interested in others thoughts on this? Am I just rationalizing running with to few staff?
Thanks
Phil