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Common IT Organization Structure

A common IT organization often looks like the following illustration:

Common IT Organization

Common IT organizations also often have the following IT roles:

1.  Office of the CIO – The CIO is the top person in charge of the IT Organization, and typically reports into the CFO or the COO, depending on the strategic nature of IT to the organization.  The CIO is responsible for the overall budget, prioritizing IT projects with the business, managing the overall IT portfolio, and enforcing all policies and standards within the IT organization.

2.  Business Partners – Business Partners represent business roles that report into IT, but dotted line into various business units within the organization.  The business units can be either geographically organized (eg. US, Asia, Europe, etc), or by horizontal function (eg. Finance, Legal, HR, Operations, etc).  The job of the business partner is to be the eyes and ears of IT with the business…gathering requirements, prioritizing projects, building business cases, and kicking off and overseeing projects from a business perspective.

3.  Vendor Management - Because IT is such a large budget line item for an organization, and because the contracts can be very large, many IT organizations put an IT Vendor Management organization in place that works very closely with procurement.  Vendor Management is responsible for managing/negotiating contracts with vendors to ensure economies of scale are leveraged, and value is generated for the organization.

4.  Project Management Office (PMO) – The PMO is the organization inside of IT responsible for ensuring projects come in on time, and on budget.  Through good process and enforcement of policies, a strong PMO is critical to the success of any IT organization.

5.  Architecture and Security – This is the are where IT Architects can help an IT organization be successful.  Architecture is the technical group inside of IT that figures out “how” projects will be delivered technically.  For more information on how an Architecture group is typically structured, please click here.

6.  Implementation Resources – Up until now, all of the roles defined have been responsible for the business aspects of IT…business alignment, budgets, and overall design of the systems that are implemented.  However, the “Implementation Resources” are the individuals who actually put together/support the IT systems.  They are made up of helpdesk resources, application developers, infrastructure resources (eg. System Administrators, Database Administrators, etc), and individuals who maintain the data and voice networks.  Often, these resources are outsourced as they are needed in large quantities early on in the project lifecycle, but not needed as much after the project is implemented.

These common roles, whether they are specifically designated or not, fulfill many common needs of a larger organization.  In many ways, these roles represent common roles of any organization.  There is a management team in charge of budgets, a sales team (Business Partners) responsible for interfacing with internal customers, a R&D department responsible for coming up with new products to meet customer needs (Architecture), and teams of individuals responsible for designing and building the products the internal organization needs to function (PMO/Implementation teams).  The most successful IT organizations think of themselves as a business whose #1 goal is to serve the needs of their customer…the business of the organization.

Mike Graber