IT Organization

Information technology organizations have made great strides in the past ten years in efficiency and business integration through massive cost cutting, increasing commonality across the company, and consolidating distributed resources. New challenges are emerging with more IT-savvy people in non-IT functions, new technology paradigms such as Web 2.0 mash-ups and software as a service, and a rapidly evolving IT-services and business-process outsourcing ecosystem. Successful IT organizations must, therefore, reinvent themselves to take their efficiency and effectiveness to the next level and manage IT like a business.

Today’s CIOs are under pressure not only to optimize IT costs but also to generate value. They face a number of critical questions:

• What should be the overall role of IT in the organization? As many of the day-to-day execution roles have been moved to external providers, should IT move more aggressively to take an active role in activities such as business process design, business transformation leadership, product design, and shared business services?

• How can an IT organization run like an efficient factory with a Six Sigma philosophy and also help generate IT-enabled business innovations as an R&D lab or venture-capital-funded start-up would?

• What is the best way to organize? How many layers should there be in the organization? How many people should managers manage?

• Are we attracting the right talent, and, if so, are we managing them effectively?

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