4 thoughts on IT Strategy and the ideal IT organisation

When we design our IT Strategy an important element is designing the ideal team that we should put in place to execute the strategy. If we get this wrong then we may significantly undermine the strategy, increase the cost of delivering the strategy, and/or risk putting in place a team that becomes an obstacle in delivering the strategy. When i think about IT teams in the context of strategy, 4 things come to mind:

Context is everything

A deep understanding of the organisational context is essential to be able to design the right team for the organisation. This includes:

  • Understanding the capabilities and maturity of the existing team

  • Understanding the maturity of the organisation, and its capabilities, as these are dependencies and constraints to be considered when designing the team

  • Situational awareness on the strategic/competitive landscape of the organisation

If we don’t understand this well, or make assumptions then we risk designing an organisation that doesn’t fit the context of the organisation. I’ve seen situations where, for example, a new CIO comes into an organisation, and without really understanding the organisation, started implementing cookie cutter changes to the IT organisation (often reflecting what they had in a previous organisation), in my experience this never goes well and often leads to re-work of the IT organisation when the cookie cutter comes into contact with the organisational reality (pastry?).

Minimum Viable Team

Once we understand the the context within which the team needs to operate, I find a useful thought experiment is the think about and sketch out what the minimum viable team looks like, this is a useful thought experiment to avoid Parkinson’s law. Thinking about the minimum viable team helps us answer two key questions:

  1. What are the essential capabilities of the team

  2. what are the essential roles that help delivery those capabilities?

Capabilities and their commoditisation will shape our team

Capabilities and their commoditisation will shape your team

What our IT team needs to do should be shaped by an understanding of the capabilities it needs to deliver, and the relative commoditisation of those capabilities. We can use Wardley Mapping as a tool to help us identify the capabilities, understand their commoditisation, that then helps us inform how we might source, make use of, invest and manage those capabilities.

Avoid anchoring our thinking near the status quo

I have seen IT strategies severely hobbled by constraining the thinking and implementation of the new IT organisation around what the status quo of the IT organisation is. This can come from politics, ego, leadership weakness, fear, and numerous other sources, but the net result is always the same, an IT organisation that struggles to effectively deliver the strategy because it just isn’t the right IT organisation to do the job.

What do you think? How do you ensure you have the right IT Organisation in place to delivery your IT Strategy?

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