Quality vs "Productivity"

I've read an article recently talking about the state of workers nowadays. It will seem that with the crazy drive for productivity, many companies seem to lose sight of the services that they are providing to their customers. In essence, this means the quality of their service.

No matter the definition given, productivity in many companies just mean that you can do multiple things at the same time. Simply said, it just means you're a jack of all trades. I feel that many are now discounting the importance of having specialists. In fact, if you look at our educational system, it seems to me that they are encouraging generalists more than specialists. Why? I'm sure they will give the usual reasons that it provides more flexibility, adaptability, etc etc.

Yes I do not deny that it does. However, there is one important advantage about specialists. They are the subject matter experts in their area and this will result in a improvement in the quality of thinking that you're providing to your customers.

For example, looking from the technology point of view. You may have an architect that has experience in designing Dot Net systems. For those in the technology sector, you have definitely heard of SharePoint. Tell me, who will provide more quality to your customers? A Dot Net architect, or a SharePoint architect?

Definitely the product specialist will be able to provide better value because they are able to design and optimise the solution that they are providing to the customers. How they can do that is because of their intimate knowledge of the product that they specialist in.

Granted I've seen so called product specialist whose knowledge is so rudimentary it made me feel that the certificate may not be real, but by and large, there are such experts out there, and the problem is that the current education system are no longer producing such specialists. In fact, the way the education syllabus is structured, it would also seem that they are even discouraging specialist even if you wish to go down this route.

Sigh. I pay school fees and yet I'm unable to study the modules that I'm interested. That's the 21st century for you. Stupid, but true.