A FEW days ago, we had a great chat with Marc Cecere, Forrester’s CIO and IT organisation expert on the trends and changes we are seeing in IT organisations. The great thing about talking with analysts is that it forces you to summarise your thinking. In gathering our thoughts, we think two types of questions are currently driving re-evaluation of IT organisation structure:

1. How can we improve our business operations using technology?

2. What does IT need to do to best support recent business strategy changes?

Interestingly, both of these questions have emerged as a result of the recent economic downturn and pending recovery, albeit at different times in the cycle. Improving business operations with IT got attention frst as each and every part of the business has been under the microscope over the last couple of years. Supporting business changes is a more recent topic as corporate leaders are setting new courses to emerge stronger and CIOs are seeking to understand how to best support the changes.

Improving Business Operations
Where do the business process experts live in your organisation? We’re not talking about the people who are experts in operating the processes every day but those who truly understand the processes that make things run – both the individual processes and the overall “operating model” or how they all fit together. Some manufacturing froms and those with a strong quality culture have organisations focused on process design and management in addition to line process experts. Some others have added a process view into their business and/or enterprise architecture planning and measurement. However, we suspect that for a majority of companies, some of the best process design, analysis, troubleshooting and management skills live in IT.

Many investment banks, where IT is also the product manufacturer, recognised the Ops and Tech synergies long ago and have combined the two into a single organisation. Companies in industries seeking more operational effciencies have started to explore this combined Tech+Ops organisation model too. We have seen early signs of this trend in Health Insurance, P&C Insurance and Financial Services industries where IT also has a signifcant role in manufacturing.

There are many implications of this combined organisation but the most signifcant is how to maintain the focus on innovation as the process/ops emphasis will surely drive attention to effciency and productivity. For organisations in which IT is only expected to drive internal innovations, this model may be a perfect fit.

Supporting Business Change
As organisations prepare for another growth cycle, they will at a minimum need to change some of their metrics and some will re-evaluate their fundamental strategies, like the way one of our global clients did. This  have traditionally grown with a North American dominated strategy. Contemplating their next wave of growth, the CEO knew that each region would need their own goals and leadership to drive it. As a result, they have a new set of regional organisations.

What should be IT’s response? They could stand put, assuming that they already know their global businesses and are serving them well or they could re-organise to get physically closer to each business and confgure each regional IT team for its mission – rapid growth, agility, operational effciency, etc.

Whenever the discussion centres on the age-old “centralized or decentralised” organisation trade-offs, we always come back to one question.  Does the IT organisation already operate well using a single set of management and operational processes?  If so, then decentralisation of some parts is an option. If not, then trying to drive fundamental standardisation in a decentralised organisation is a non starter. The organisation must already know how to work together before it starts to separate itself.

We would love to know how the trends in your industry are causing you to re-think your organisations – or not.

CHRIS CURRAN is Diamond Management & Technology Consultants’ chief technology officer and managing partner of the firm’s technology practice. He writes the CIO Dashboard blog at www.ciodashboard.com