I’m a strong advocate of the value of expertise to a software organization. I’d even go so far as to say that expertise is a panacea.
Despite the value of expertise, there are two significant obstacles to organizations to leverage expertise as effectively as possible.
Expertise is expensive to acquire
Developing expertise is expensive for an organization to acquire. Becoming an expert requires experience, which takes time and effort. An organization can hire for some forms of expertise, but no organization can hire someone who is already an expert in the org’s socio-technical system. And a lot of the value for an organization is having expertise in the behaviors of the local system.
You can transfer expertise from one person to another, but that also takes time and effort, and you need to put mechanisms in place to support this. Apprenticeship and coaching are two traditional methods of expertise transfer, but also aren’t typically present in software organizations. I’m an advocate of learning from incidents as a medium for skill transfer, but that requires its own expertise for doing incident investigation in a way that supports skill transfer.
Alas, you can’t transfer expertise from a person to a tool, as John Allspaw notes, so we can’t take a shortcut by acquiring sophisticated tooling. AI researchers tried building such expert systems in the 1980s, but these efforts failed.
Concentrated expertise is dangerous
Organizations tend to foster local experts: a small number of individuals who have a lot of expertise with aspects of the local system. These people are enormously valuable to organizations (they’re often very helpful during incidents), but they represent single points of failure. If these individuals happen to be out of the office during a critical incident, or if they leave the company, it can be very costly to the organization. My former colleague Nora Jones calls this the islands of knowledge problem.
What’s worse, high concentration of expertise can become a positive feedback loop. If there’s a local expert, then other individuals may use the expert as a crutch, relying on the expert to solve the harder problems and never putting in the effort to develop their own expertise.
To avoid this problem, we need to develop the expertise in more people within the organization, which, is as mentioned earlier, is expensive.
I continue to believe that it’s worth it.
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