The Accidental CIO

5How We Are Organized

Any organization that designs a system … is constrained to produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

—Melvin Conway, 1968

We don't hire smart people to tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do.

—Steve Jobs

Companies need hierarchies to run the business, and a network structures to adapt and change the business.

—J. P. Kotter

It won't surprise you to learn that there isn't a single perfect design to organize the IT department that will suit all contexts. What is likely to be universally common is the need for a structure that can support a business's ability to both explore and exploit, to manage complexity, to drive innovation while maximizing efficiencies and simplifying processes. In this chapter, we will look at how employing traditional command-and- control hierarchies coupled with the recent emergence of holacratic networked teams can provide a balanced structure that combines flexibility with control, alignment with autonomy, and purpose with ownership. These are all required to manage the cross section of challenges and opportunities that a modern business will present.

We will take a detailed look at network teams, known as product teams, and how they are a move away from organizing people around short-term projects to persistent teams designed around key technical, social, and business boundaries that require long-term investment. We will look at how to define ...