System Transformation Portal

Establishing an organizational purpose and set of guiding principles is a critical step for an IT organization. The IT council and design team must come to grips with the future role of IT and how that role will incorporate business units and external entities including suppliers, vendors and customers. This task describes the process of creating a purpose and set of principles for IT as a whole. The purpose and principles for major hub categories will be defined later in the task entitled Design New Organizational Structure.

Define Information Management Organization Purpose
A statement of purpose should clearly state in one sentence why the organization exists. This is not a mission statement and should, therefore, avoid any marketing or hype. A sample IT statement of purpose might appear as follows.

"Ensure that customers, suppliers, business partners and internal business units succeed by enabling the timely dissemination of secure, standardized and integrated information across and beyond the enterprise."

While establishing a statement of purpose may seem relatively easy, the process can be frustrating and time consuming. A number of chaordic organizations that have undertaken this task have found that a meeting of minds is essential. If there is strong disagreement about the role of external entities or whether an outsourcing partner should sit on the IT council, these issues must surface during the drafting of the statement of purpose. The process one follows includes the following steps.

1. Gather representatives (i.e. the IT council and design team) together to discuss purpose and principles.
2. Ensure that relevant and affected parties are either directly or indirectly represented.
3. Define the scope of the new IT organization.
4. Identify the key elements that the IT organization plans to address within its scope of responsibility.
5. Identify the most critical and comprehensive of these elements and begin drafting a statement of purpose.
6. Gain concurrence from participants.
7. Gain approval from the CEO, board of directors or other oversight bodies.
8. Release the statement of purpose with a caveat that it could change as the principles are drafted.

Define Information Management Organization Principles
Once a statement of purpose is in place, the IT council and design team should draft a set of principles to guide the actions of participants within the new infrastructure. These principles must support the statement of purpose and may call that statement into question. Principles should be high level enough to be applied broadly across the information infrastructure and never tell people how to accomplish a given task. A sample set of guiding principles is shown below.

1. Foster an environment where the information management function can readily adapt to internal and external business and technical dynamics.
2. Collaborate with customers, business partners, suppliers and business units to develop quality information solutions.
3. In all decisions, ensure that quality is a high priority.
4. Deliver standardized information and interpretations of that information in a timely manner.
5. Determine the impact of near-term actions on the overall quality, stability and maintainability of the overall systems architecture.
6. Focus on security, consistency, the elimination of reduction of redundancy, and sound architectural practices in all decisions.
7. Consider reuse, migration, integration, acquisition and new development options in all information management projects.
8. Incorporate interim deliverables, periodic reviews and collective decision-making when assessing balancing time commitments versus quality.
9. Barring privacy or security issues, all project plans and status, infrastructure information, migration and outsourcing plans are open to all infrastructure participants.
10. Leaders are selected by their hub to represent that hub at the next inner hub.
11. A new hub may be created as long as it adheres to core IT purpose and principles, has representation from relevant and affected parties and does not replicate an existing hub.
12. All hub meetings are open to representation from all satellites of that hub.

These sample principles unify IT functions across the enterprise, while allowing individual hubs to function within a flexible framework. The process of creating these principles is very similar to the process of drafting a statement of purpose.

1. Gather the IT council and design team together and reiterate the commitment to the statement of purpose.
2. Examine the scope of IT responsibilities and build a list of each of these.
3. Drive the list of responsibilities into a set of principles, but take care not to prescribe the method of adhering to these principles.
4. Verify that the list addresses all major areas and issues under the new infrastructure.
5. Review each principle in light of how it supports the statement of purpose.
6. Where required, either modify the principles to synchronize them with the purpose or modify the purpose to synchronize it with the principles.
7. Send the principles to the applicable review participants as required.
8. Distribute the principles with the purpose to designers within the enterprise.

Drafting a Purpose & Principles for Individual Hubs
In order to further the purpose and principles established in this task, each major hub connected to the IT council hub will need to craft its own purpose and principles to guide activities within that functional area. This process is defined in the task that is entitled Design New Organizational Structure.