From IT World Canada . . .Future Stock – Experts profile the new IT organization By: Carolyn Duffy Marsan

While they offer some suggestions, it appears to be in reworking what is already there. Sometimes you need to bulldoze the house into the foundations to rebuild something of value. Lipstick and mascara isn’t always enough!

But, there are some good points in this article…

The CIO as business thinker and a CTO as technology thinker. This would address my view that business people are strategic and technolgy people are tactical.

Then the three models they discuss: centralized, decentralized and federated…but there are still lots of grey areas where the functions and management of deliverable services are unclear.

Jerry Luftman, distinguished professor at the Howe School of Technology Management at Stevens Institute of Technology says: “We’re really pushing the hybrid or federated organization, which combines the strengths of centralized and decentralized organizational structures. From my research, it’s clear that companies that are federated have a better shot [at] receiving a higher score on alignment of IT and the business. In centralized organizations, the decision makers tend to be reluctant to move to a federated model because they are losing people reporting to them.

Another issue is the career for IT professionals in a federated structure because they now report to the business. Another issue is that it’s not just the organizational structure that CIOs need to focus on. If you change your organization but you don’t change your governance processes, it’s not going to work. ”

Hmm…Most of that sounds promising. What do you think?

Dean Owen