The Executive’s Guide to Information Technology, Second Edition

Chapter 5. The IT Organization

	You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly too.
	--John Kenneth Galbraith[1]

This chapter identifies the organizational components of the IT department and defines the roles and responsibilities of the IT staff and the interdepartmental and intradepartmental interactions necessary to complete IT projects on time while successfully running the existing systems and applications. While there are a wide variety of ways to structure an IT organization, we recommend a specific structure that has proven successful across many companies. This chapter addresses two major aspects of the IT organization—the structure of the organization and the division of labor within the structure.

The wide variety of roles and responsibilities in an IT organization can be difficult to fully understand for those in the organization and completely baffling to those outside the IT department. The myriad of technologies and their complicated interactions require a complex organization that can support the business while managing sophisticated technology environments and achieving the highest levels of service. Creating an organization that can achieve this is a daunting task. The inputs to this organization come from every direction, ranging from the IT organization working to maintain the systems day-to-day and solve customer problems; the business from user questions to system problems to the endless ...