The Changing Face Of IT
informationweek.com
Some highlights:
.....Certainly, IT staffs at most companies are growing. According to an InformationWeek Research survey of 228 IT professionals conducted in June, a majority of companies large and small have increased their IT staffs within the past few years because of company growth, E-business initiatives, and generally increased business demands.
But there seems to be no strong consensus on how an IT staff should be organized. According to the survey, 38% of companies with $50 million or more in revenue are working toward decentralizing their IT departments; the other 62% are sticking with a centralized structure........
.......Decentralization can cause other problems. With a high degree of decentralization, for example, it's natural for ad hoc IT groups (sometimes called shadow or rogue IT organizations) to form-each setting up whatever standards seem most expedient for them. They know their own needs, but they don't necessarily have a companywide context for what they're doing. The problem is at least twofold: They're doing redundant work, and, worse than that, what they create may not be compatible across all departments.
Even in an organization whose goal is centralization, such ad hoc efforts are hard to control. "Most CIOs would say that shadow organizations exist," says FedEx CIO Carter. The problem is compounded when organizations turn to outside contractors for quick fixes. "Born out of the IT backlog, it's natural to say, 'bring in a few contractors,'" Carter says. "I spend a lot of personal energy to manage it........"
............Just as the glass house disappeared, the more recent iteration of the IT organization, the client-server support organization, is rapidly becoming an historical artifact - or at the very least, it's being subsumed under something new and much more exciting. For one thing, companies finally realize that IT managers are important assets when it comes to planning E-business strategies. More than half of companies surveyed by InformationWeek Research include IT executives when planning E-business initiatives. The more technology-intensive the company, the more likely that IT will sit at the head table. At Mitre, for example, the heads of all technology centers-including operations and business strategy-form the I-Team, as it's called: an "innovation team" to advise the CEO on new business and other initiatives.
There's a common denominator in all of this: IT organizations are at the heart of the pace of change that's affecting businesses, and that pace is accelerating at a dizzying speed. Rules and boundaries no longer apply. Companies must be willing to evolve and adapt their IT organizations-or face the danger of falling behind.
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