"No one is losing a job necessarily, but everyone is tight now so we are trying to get more out of the staff we have," Meyer says. "Consolidating this Layer 1 functionality -- a jack is a jack and cable is cable and it's all in the same closet now -- prevents us from having two people doing the same thing and adds more efficiency to our staff."
Others say the current economy simply shines a spotlight on how IT is expected to operate normally. For instance, a company looking to establish a director of business applications or manager of ERP systems might opt to reassign existing staff instead of hiring a new employee regardless of Wall Street's status.
"It's the nature of IT now to blend responsibilities and create dual roles in part because some of the technical capabilities can be applied across IT domains, but also because it simply doesn't make sense to spend [US]$80,000 per year to hire a full-time employee when you can get the job done by making that role one-third of someone's job," says Chris Holbert, CIO and COO at LaunchPad Communications.