I'm in a similar boat. My question to you: What do you want? Do you want to enjoy your job, make a lot of money, move high within the company?
If you like coding, architecture and other technical stuff and truly don't want to go the management route then keep your head down and do the tech stuff well. Don't worry about cultivating contacts in other departments. Offload the requirements gathering and program management and concentrate on design, architecture, development and implementation. Do your job well and you'll be rewarded and respected and left to keep doing the tech stuff you enjoy.
If you want money and position then cultivate those contacts, get some face-time with the bigwigs, make sure you're at those important meetings. Eventually you'll do less and less coding.
Once you figure out where you want to go you'll have a better idea of how to get there.
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I'm in a similar boat. My question to you: What do you want? Do you want to enjoy your job, make a lot of money, move high within the company?
If you like coding, architecture and other technical stuff and truly don't want to go the management route then keep your head down and do the tech stuff well. Don't worry about cultivating contacts in other departments. Offload the requirements gathering and program management and concentrate on design, architecture, development and implementation. Do your job well and you'll be rewarded and respected and left to keep doing the tech stuff you enjoy.
If you want money and position then cultivate those contacts, get some face-time with the bigwigs, make sure you're at those important meetings. Eventually you'll do less and less coding.
Once you figure out where you want to go you'll have a better idea of how to get there.