Article

Design Your IT Organization for the Future

Philip Henery
Philip Henery
April 10, 2025

Deliver on your most critical objectives with a strategically aligned IT structure.

ROCIMG Executive Summary

If your IT strategy is your map, your IT organizational structure represents the optimal path to get there.

IT organizational design refers to the process of aligning the organization’s structure, processes, metrics, and talent to the organization’s strategic plan to drive efficiency and effectiveness. It considers how people should be arranged to deliver on critical work.

But why is the “right” IT organizational design so critical to success?

  • Adaptability is at the core of staying competitive today. Digital technology and information transparency are driving organizations to reorganize around customer responsiveness. To remain relevant and competitive, your organizational design must be forward-looking and ready to adapt to rapid pivots in technology or customer demand.
  • Structure is not just an organizational chart. The design of your organization dictates how roles function within their teams. This is usually the most difficult part in organizational design. As a result, leaders are quick to skip or loosely define (Kathi Enderes, 2022). Structure supports strategy, but strategy also follows structure.
  • Organizational design is a never-ending process. Organization design is not a one-time project but a continuous, dynamic process of organizational self-learning and continuous improvement. Landing on the right operating model will provide a solid foundation to build upon as the organization adapts to new challenges and opportunities.

Additionally, aligning your IT resources in the right structure is critical as:

  • It ensures that the organization structure will support the delivery of the strategy.
  • Resources can be easily developed or distributed to flex with changes in trends.
  • It can eliminate gaps in service delivery to consistently meet or exceed stakeholder expectations.
  • It increases the overall effectiveness of the IT team.
  • It attracts and retains top IT talent.

The Obstacles

These obstacles prevent organizations from achieving the right IT structure:

  • Leaders focus on the organizational chart only, forgetting other critical elements of organizational design process.
  • The organizational redesign makes changes to employee’s roles and teams on paper but not in practice.
  • Employees were not sought for their feedback or input during the process of designing the IT structure.
  • Organizational redesign was used to solve an unrelated problem.
  • Despite organizations wanting and willing to grow, there is insufficient talent readily available.
  • No one is held accountable if the organizational redesign efforts fail.

Poor processes and limited resources make organizational design difficult.

51% of organizations are completely ineffective at organizational design.

Source: Cathie Enders, ‘Organization Design: The Secret to Scaling for Growth,’ 2022

Our Insights

  • Organizations that succeed in designing the right IT organizational structure do more than just moving boxes and lines on a page. They provide teams with clarity around how they will interact and collaborate to deliver on critical outcomes.
  • IT organizations excelling today aren’t waiting for the right person to join their IT organization. They design the right teams and develop their workforce.
  • Organizations creating, driving, and succeeding in digital transformation don’t consider the organizational structure a stagnant place. They constantly refine it to evolve with the changing organization needs.

Analyst Perspective

Establishing clear ways of working will allow the organizational structure to thrive.

For many organizations, designing the right IT structure usually begins with adjusting the organizational chart. Reimagining the lines and boxes that exist. However, this is a false attempt at an organizational redesign.

True organizational design explores the ways in which employees will be expected to work daily, delivering on their role-specific value. It is founded on an operating model that can consistently articulate how IT delivers on the strategic objectives of the organization. Furthermore, it provides employees with clarity on how they get their job done. From whom they collaborate with, to critical communication opportunities, to shared knowledge across teams and practices. Employees are empowered to deliver their best work and not second-guess their responsibilities.

Moreover, this process is increasingly more effective when employees are included. From creating their team’s purpose statement to documenting the processes they lead or support, actively including employees in the organizational redesign will always enable a faster adoption of the organizational structure.

Our Approach

By adopting these best practices your organizational design efforts will always be successful:

  • Treat organizational design as a critical step in the transformation process – without it the transformation is not complete.
  • Ensure that employees are given the tools and skills to effectively operate in this new structure – and reinforce those behaviors when demonstrated.
  • Engage employees and other stakeholders regularly to prevent rework and capture informal but critical steps in the delivering process.
  • Eliminate ambiguity as often as possible by ensuring that the responsibilities and accountabilities are clearly defined at team and role levels.

The Effects of our approach:

  • Provides teams with a clear purpose on how they deliver value to the organization.
  • Estimates the right number of resources required to achieve demand from the organization.
  • Defines the team ways of working to establish communication, collaboration, and hand-offs.
  • Continues to be adjusted and updated to enable the right structure.

In Conclusion

Organizational design is about providing clear ways of working, not moving boxes and lines on an organizational chart. This is the key difference between organizations that succeed and those that fail.

Organizational design also takes place in four distinct phases:

Phase 1:

IT organizations excelling today aren’t waiting for the right person to join their IT organization. They design the right teams and develop their workforce.

Phase 2:

Value from the organizational chart comes only when other components of an organizational redesign are also completed. Focusing on the chart alone will leave employees and stakeholders unsure of why the changes were required.

Phase 3:

Ways of working is the most important aspect of organizational design. This is when the employee experience is considered.

Phase 4:

Organizations creating, driving, and succeeding in digital transformation don’t consider the organizational structure stagnant. They constantly refine it to evolve with the changing organizational needs.

Designing the right IT organization structure that:

  • Sits upon an operating model foundation that dictates how IT should function.
  • Ensures that functional work teams and reporting relationships are clearly defined.
  • Establishes the right span of control to support the objectives of the teams and desired culture.
  • Provides employees with clear ways of working to eliminate confusion and redundancy.

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About the Author

Philip Henery
Philip Henery
Marketing Administrator

Philip is a writer, editor, voiceover narrator, and producer of several forms of media from news articles to biographies, novels, podcasts, and even local music artists. He is ROCIMG's Marketing Administrator, and is partially responsible for pushing his company's presence to the forefront of their localized industry.

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