What's in a name?

Whenever a new technology was deployed at Precision Response, a new title was created right along with it. That led to 150 titles within the company's 220-person IT department. "It seemed like every time we had a new technology, or a new anything, we made up a title," says Bill Hicks, senior vice president of technology and CIO at the Miami customer services company. "We said, 'This is making no sense.' Just because I'm changing from developing on Oracle to developing on Windows, my title shouldn't change."

So about 18 months ago Precision Response started whittling down its IT titles. Today, the company has only 20. Creating less-specific titles lets Hicks move staff around as needed, a definite plus in today's volatile economy. "With the constant change in technology - platforms, reorganization - we felt it was easier to create a more generic title that describes your band or level in the organization," he says.

Hicks' direct reports, for example, used to have vice president titles that were tied to their areas of discipline, such as vice president of technology services or vice president of IS. Now they're all simply vice presidents of IT.

It's a practice that many businesses seem to be taking as they realize the need to make more efficient use of IT talent.

"Because of downsizing and so forth, lots of companies are doing things with fewer people. So it really comes down to whether the title represents what people are working on," says Lily Mok, a senior consultant at People3, a Gartner company that combines IT and human resources expertise to help businesses get the most out of their IT workforce.

"In most cases, companies say, 'Our people are multifunctional right now.' So where they might have been specialists in the past, right now they have to be generalists and work on many things at the same time," Mok says. "The title to some point really doesn't tell you much."

Not that titles no longer hold value. David Foote, president and chief research officer of market research and advisory firm Foote Partners, says the number of certifications available to IT professionals is growing and a certification can mean higher pay. That leads people to specialize.

"Whether companies are choosing to recognize these specialties [with titles] is entirely a matter of corporate philosophy and corporate culture," he says, noting that he still gets calls from companies looking for compensation information for positions such as Teradata engineer and Java developer.

But Foote also points out that in today's tough economy, professionals with more general titles might have a leg up.

"If you were a specialist and you put yourself in the wrong specialty, you could have aced yourself right out of a job," he says. "In really good times specialists make a lot of money, but the disadvantage of a specialty is it's less flexible. If you look at generalists, they keep their options open, they have more mobility. Some of these generalists have been able to adapt much more quickly in the down economy."