Factors to Consider in Designing IT Organizations
Few employees enjoy departmental re-structuring, and IT professionals are no exception.
Although IT professionals are involved in one of the most rapidly changing of technical
industries, we still tend to be creatures of habit that, like most everyone else, prefer stable
and unchanging environments as mo. Newly assigned executives and managers are often
notorious for proposing a partial or total re-organization of their entire department as one of
their first official acts.
But in the case of IT, re-structuring often is necessary to support company growth, increased
customer demand, changing business requirements, acquisitions, mergers, buyouts or other
industry changes. The question then becomes: on which factors should we base the restructuring
of IT organizations, particularly infrastructures. In my experience there are three
key factors on which to base these decisions: departmental responsibilities, planning
orientation and infrastructure processes. These factors tend to follow the normal evolution
of an IT organization from company startup to full corporate maturity.
For example, startup companies usually structure their IT departments initially with a very
basic organization such as that shown in Figure 1-1. As the company grows and IT begins
expanding its services, an administrative department is added to the base structure as shown
in Figure 1-2. The administrative department would be responsible for billing, invoices,
asset management, procurement, human resources and other tactically oriented support
activities. During these early building years of a corporation, IT usually structures its
organization by departmental responsibilities. As the departmental responsibilities in each of
the three groups reporting to the CIO continue to grow, they will likely evolve into an
organization similar to that shown in Figure 1-3. The applications department is split out
between application development and application maintenance. The infrastructure
department is organized between technical services & network services, and computer
operations. The administration department has added planning to its charter of
responsibilities. This is a key event as it marks the first formal initiation of a planning
responsibility within IT, although much of its early emphasis is on tactical, short-term
planning.