Sorry, the name might seem a bit more adventurous than the reality. In small and medium organizations, everyone has a pretty good idea who provides the IT tech support, but in large organizations the field these days tend to be getting fairly muddy. While there is usually formal IT department or program, in reality their primary focus in is network integrity and scaling up or down tolls on an Enterprise basis. Additionally, and just as equally important, much of their time is also spent on security and defense given that attacks are practically relentless from the moment a connection is made to the Internet.
However, for grassroots ideas where new concepts and ideas are fostered, especially with new possibilities on how to do business better, faster and more effectively, big organizational IT is frequently not found. The job of development is either taken on by a contractor brought in to do the scoping, planning or build, or it gets done by internal shadow IT workers. These are folks who have enough development and training in some aspect of IT to be functional and effective, but they are not official IT roles. Oftentimes, then tend to be managers who have a knack for learning and getting involved well-beyond their typical scope. It can also include folks who have gained a significant amount of IT knowledge and skills from extra learning or just exposure and practice because they can do the work.
Adoption by Discipline
Facilities security was probably one of the first to start crossing over functions, embracing IT tools and becoming versed in their use for, namely, security monitoring. Instead of paying outrageous dollars for network administrators, security companies and offices quickly trained their own staff to manage systems their related databases. Today, security officers are typically adept at managing video and audio data, tracking systems, database management and communications, even though they are technically not IT workers per se.
Over the years, more and more areas have bled into IT just by the nature of the work involved. Database management and finance has been another early blurring of the lines, and now personnel management is also falling into the fray as well. Marketing really exploded in the last five years as well, especially with the widespread use of CRM systems, GIS, and dashboards.
The Dilution of the IT Department
Because of so many areas becoming versed in various aspects of IT, it's not surprising that traditional IT has been seeing an erosion of their function and, more importantly, their value to large organizations. There will continue to be primary network administrators, security programs and developers with companies that want that value kept in-house. However, the constant push for doing things cheaper, especially now that AI is so widespread, has been turning IT support into a commodity suffering from the lowest price death spiral. It's not a good forecast for the tech field at all.
Worse, companies that are big on outsourcing and cloud have relinquished their internal IT support altogether. It's a mistake in the long-run, especially when these organizations find themselves dependent on services that suddenly jack up their pricing. But by then, the managers who made those decisions have moved onto another over-priced C-suite role.
So, if you're hoping the tech industry is going to make you rich, think again. The industry is clearly moving into yet another trough like it did after the 1980s when programmers became a dime a dozen, and paid just as low. It will bounce again into a new direction, but that likely not manifest until five years from now if things follow the same cycle as previous decades. And where that new angle appears could be anyone's guess. Most think its Web x.0 but I suspect the niche will be something not yet visible, i.e. a new novel aspect of tech like the dot-com phase was in the early 1990s. In the meantime, hunker down. Learn new skills, become resilient and keep broadening your knowledge. And when opportunity appears, grab it by the jugular and don't look back. That's how fast it will happen.