Is "polymath" a required job skill - a new job title - for IT professionals?
The number of distinct job titles, and associated skill sets, in IT have multiplied over the years. New approaches, like Agile, have added even more (e.g. Coach, Scrum Master, Craftsman). A recent book by Vinnie Marchandani, The New Polymath: Profiles in Compound-Technology Innovations, has prompted a flurry of discussion about the polymath as an essential job title / job skill.
Strictly speaking, a polymath is someone who knows everything there is to know, and Leibniz is considered by most to have been the last polymath. Today the term is used more or less synonymously with "renaissance man" - a person who is master of many disciplines, like Leonardo da Vinci was the master of painting, anatomy, sculpture, mechanics, architecture, etc.
According to Marchandani,
[in the past] ... we have relied on Polymaths to innovate and find creative solutions to the problems of the day ... The New Polymath excels in multiple technologies—infotech, cleantech, healthtech, and other tech—and leverages multiple talent pools to create new medicine, new energy, and new algorithms.
Phil Wainewright talks about how the polymath idea applies to his specialty, cloud computing:
Too many people look at cloud merely in terms of the underlying technology of virtualization and IT automation. Although there are some very useful incremental improvements available there ... this very narrow view misses out the bigger picture of global, real-time connectivity that provides the defining context for cloud computing. Disruptive, game-changing business innovation becomes possible when you start to join up the dots and take...(see more)
