How is your IT org structure set up to ensure you are on top of business priorities?

Our Strat and Op planning starts from the C Suite down and then individual/team objectives are linked to these and built up to support the overall business objectives.

We have a business-led IT, business leaders and their teams have an increasingly large role in technology selection, deployment, and management and will often pay for technology directly from their own budgets. The new operating model for IT is designed to support business-led IT in three ways:1) By offering a range of engagement activities and points of contact, adaptive business engagement allows business leaders to easily and directly (without intermediaries) engage the IT staff best suited to support them.2) Teams in IT such as the product lines and Enterprise Architecture, PMO, and Information Risk rebalance their portfolio of responsibilities away from delivery and governance toward consulting, advising, and assisting business leaders.3) Applications building blocks, cloud-based scalable infrastructure, and a coherent data strategy make it easier for business leaders to integrate their solutions.

Before creating your IT org structure, it’s very important that you first get a full understanding of how the business is organized. For example, what are the key business functions and how do they interact with one another.Next, take some time to understand how functions have been placed into the organization. Is the finance team integrated within a unit or does finance work horizontally across teams? This allows you, in turn, to breakdown how to best organize your own IT team to best serve the company.My preference has been to have IT professionals in each business unit. I want to avoid one-off projects and instead position them as part of the team. They should be at every team discussion and in every meeting with the business leads. While they have a solid reporting line to the CIO, they also need to have a dotted line reporting into the CMO or CFO (depending on which unit they are working with). I think it is vital that the business thinks of them as integral. It’s the only way IT moves away from being seen as a back office function.

In our company, the technical knowledge across functional areas is relatively high. Therefore, in setting up the IT org we had to ensure that we were always able to add real value.Our engineering teams, similar to many other companies, have been broken down by technology areas. Where we differ is that we have an org structure with IT Product Managers as an overlay on top of the engineering teams. These PMs are organized by functional areas. We decided on this model because we wanted to emphasize the importance of partnership with the rest of the organization and to ensure that we always had an eye on customer demand.What this means in practice is that our IT PMs focus on developing strong operations partnerships with the different business units. This entails working closely with the System and Tools or Operations teams in the Sales or Finance verticals.We see these teams as our internal customers and partner with them to set strategic vision. This allows us to move away from addressing discreet or unique requests, and instead, enables us to be part of the larger business conversation (e.g. setting budgets, forecasting outlook etc.)  To put it simply, we have created a model that is not different from that of an external consulting company. Where we succeed, is that we have the added advantage of being seen as a trusted internal advisor.