IT Organisation

Challenges

Information technology organizations have made great strides in the past ten years in efficiency and business integration through massive cost cutting, increasing commonality across the company, and consolidating distributed resources. New challenges are emerging with more IT-savvy people in non-IT functions, new technology paradigms such as Web 2.0 mash-ups and software as a service, and a rapidly evolving IT-services and business-process outsourcing ecosystem. Successful IT organizations must, therefore, reinvent themselves to take their efficiency and effectiveness to the next level and manage IT like a business.
Today’s CIOs are under pressure not only to optimize IT costs but also to generate value. They face a number of critical questions:

• What should be the overall role of IT in the organization? As many of the day-to-day execution roles have been moved to external providers, should IT move more aggressively to take an active role in activities such as business process design, business transformation leadership, product design, and shared business services?
• How can an IT organization run like an efficient factory with a Six Sigma philosophy and also help generate IT-enabled business innovations as an R&D lab or venture-capital-funded start-up would?
• What is the best way to organize? How many layers should there be in the organization? How many people should managers manage?
• Are we attracting the right talent, and, if so, are we managing them effectively?

DC GROUP Competencies

We work with our clients to optimize and transform their IT organizations, and we achieve this by focusing on four major topics:

• The Role of the CIO. We help CIOs define the right roles for themselves and for their organizations. We often work with new CIOs to define a “100-day plan” that helps ensure that they spend their time on the right things and get off to a flying start.
• Business Partnership and Governance. DC GROUP works with clients to design new or improved IT-governance mechanisms that create value by making certain that business and IT are aligned on strategies, priorities, business justifications, resources, project performance, and value achievement.
• High-Performance IT Organization. We help our clients design and implement programs aimed at achieving quantum leaps in advancing their level of performance. We start with a realistic assessment of the IT organization’s performance, considering both objective measures and ratings by those they serve. We then help the IT organization design targeted programs that will significantly improve performance in problem areas such as business relationship management, project execution, application availability, recruiting, and career management.
• Skill and Talent Management. Internal IT organizations face strong competition for IT talent, especially in Western markets. DC GROUP helps IT organizations develop strategic workforce-management approaches, many of which include analysis of skill needs over the next few years, defining multiple career paths, and developing new performance-management approaches, especially for people who work in a project environment.

We have IT organization experts located in all regions to bring global insight and experience to every project. The leaders of our IT organization topic area are members of DC GROUP’s Organization practice.