Business | Opinion
Designing the right IT organisation
From being perceived as a management information systems function aligned with the finance department of the organisation, the role of IT has come a long way today in being perceived as a key enabler of business and as the backbone for effective execution of day-to-day operations.
- By Sanjiv Anand and V. Ramkumar, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:14 April 30, 2008
From being perceived as a management information systems function aligned with the finance department of the organisation, the role of IT has come a long way today in being perceived as a key enabler of business and as the backbone for effective execution of day-to-day operations.
Designing effective IT organisations has hence become strategic, as it forms an important facet of the delivery structure of the enterprise.
Although the last 10 years have seen the evolution of IT outsourcing in the global arena, it is still pertinent to determine the right internal IT organisation structure.
The four key elements that a typical IT organisation has to address are application support and vendor liaison, technical infrastructure management, project management of key IT initiatives and an internal help-desk.
The advent of enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions and core banking applications has changed the technology landscape.
Leading organisations world over have realised that implementing best-fit applications allow them to effectively adapt to industry practices, leverage periodic upgrades to the latest technology platforms and insulate from key-man risk associated with in-house IT teams.
Application support has hence evolved from an in-house system development team that used to employ dozens of programmers or more to a lean team that focuses on vendor liaison and coordination.
Technical infrastructure is critical to run a business enterprise. Running mission critical applications from its data centre, maintaining an effective disaster recovery setup, administration of database and managing office automation infrastructure are all critical.
This is one area where small and medium enterprises have significantly benefited from outsourcing to low cost and remote support models. Having an effective service level agreement with the outsourced partner is the critical success factor of this model.
Managing IT initiatives and their completion within budget and on time has always been a key focus area for boards and senior management.
These projects have relatively longer implementation periods, especially in the case of large scale ERP implementations or core banking applications, have change management impact across the organisation and are high ticket investments.
Having a dedicated project management team that focuses specifically on these projects is vital.
Lastly, having a centralised help-desk for IT support has always paid off as a 'stitch in time'. This is quite important for large organisations that have a distributed branch network. A central help-desk needs trained resources that can provide first-level support and coordinate with third-party vendors.
Globalisation has opened up vistas for IT professionals across continents. Identifying and building a team with the right mix of skill set and experience has therefore become a specialised subject matter. An inordinate demand-supply situation also impacts the compensation structure.
While outsourcing is here to stay, critical IT positions need to be defined carefully and aligned well with the overall business model. Having a business-aligned IT structure is not just critical for support, but also for an organisation's success!
Sanjiv Anand is the managing director and V Ramkumar is a director at Cedar Management Consulting International.
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