Creating and Sustaining an Effective IT Organization

  Strategy  

If IT’s primary purpose is to leverage an organization’s ability to sustain prosperous growth, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the IT organization should be designed to do the same? If this is true, why is there so much misalignment between the IT organization and the organization it serves? Could it be that IT needs to move away from a technology-centric model towards a professional services model, one that makes the business of the business their total focus? Almost seems too obvious, and yet it is indeed a rarity to be found.

Creating and sustaining effective IT organizations requires IT to model itself after the business and the processes it services and supports. So where to start? At the top, that’s where. Every CIO and core IT team worth their salt should be students of their organization’s industry and, more specifically, their company’s strategies, supporting business plans, culture, structure and business processes. Armed with this knowledge, the CIO can craft an IT organization designed to deliver services and technologies that are “spot-on.” More than this, they can sustain an IT organization that is nimble and one step ahead of the change curve. Imagine the CEO embracing the CIO and perceiving him or her as critical to the success of the company. 

To do this the CIO must design the IT organization to include a layer that mirrors the enterprise in terms of …