Managing IT Change—IT Organization

This article is a continuation of the series focusing on managing IT change in an organization. As businesses move from functional logic to integrated business processes, this series of articles has discussed the way in which different functions relate to new processes. Also, we have reviewed how other factors, such as tools and programs, used to organize and manage the enterprise, have a pronounced impact on performance. Further, this transition must be managed as part of longer-term continuous improvement programs for the overall enterprise. In our previous article, we discussed the role of business leadership in evaluating and defining IT strategy necessary to support these major and disruptive changes. One additional aspect of IT strategy that bears discussion is IT function staffing and where the work will be completed. When decisions are based on projected cost calculations, they invariably do not include an end-to-end understanding of knowledge transfer. This is a complex task moving from problem identification to whatever development organization will do the work and testing, and back. This article starts with a definition of knowledge transfer among organizational components and then discusses the role that each design component may play in efficiently and accurately completing the work.