System Transformation

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The two key organizational units driving the effort to transform IT are the IT council and the transformational design team. The process of creating and deploying these two units is outlined in this task.

Establish IT Council
Strong management is essential to the transformation of the IT organization. This begins with a core group of empowered individuals willing to build a collaborative IT function. The driving force behind this process is the IT council, which serves a dual role within an IT transformation project.

1. The council is responsible for launching and delivering the project that transforms IT from its current form into a more adaptive and collaborative model.
2. Once the new organization is in place, the council oversees the transition to the new infrastructure and remains as the coordinating hub for IT across the enterprise.

The IT council should adhere to the following principles.

1. The council must report directly to the CEO.
2. It must be fully committed to replacing the existing command and control hierarchy with a collaborative model, created using the participative design process.
3. The council must only include individuals with a commitment to a collaborative, adaptive IT organization.
4. No one on the council can be motivated by the desire to retain or increase his or her power base or by other political issues.
5. The initial incarnation of the council is drawn from individuals representing the full breadth and scope of information management across the enterprise.
6. Council members involved in building the new organization may not remain on the council after transformation to the new infrastructure.
7. The council should include representatives from administrative, application, environmental, architecture, e-business, project office and internal consulting units.
8. Business unit representation should include application management, customer, supply chain, and related issues.
9. Outsourcing vendors or other relevant and affected third parties should also be represented on the council.
10. If the organization is multi-divisional, the scope of the realignment effort must be determined so that appropriate representation can be included on the council.
11. To keep the council to a reasonable size, representation should "roll up" from various areas.
12. Upon forming, the council should meet to determine how often they wish to gather and finalize their transformation strategy.

After IT infrastructure and governance structure design work is completed, the council manages the transition to the new infrastructure. This process should be driven by newly appointed IT council participants, drawn from newly created hub structures. It is also important to note that during and beyond the transition, the IT council will not be making unilateral decisions through the command chain. The role of the council is to review progress and to make decisions that cannot be made at a more peripheral level within the hub infrastructure.

Establish Transformational Design Team
The transformation design team reports to the IT council during redesign of and transition to the new infrastructure. The design team includes representatives from all IT and non-IT information management units that minimally include the following major categories.

The design team is responsible for contributing to, enabling and facilitating the design process. Much of the design work will be undertaken where the work is actually being done. The central design team creates a framework under which this process and distributed design teams can evolve. The design team may want to establish a purpose, guiding principles and participant structure to guide their efforts. A sample design team purpose is shown below.

A sample set of guiding principles for the design team could include the following items.

1. Any design decision must obtain input from the individuals impacted by that decision.
2. Hubs will evolve around the periphery, based on the information management functions being performed.
3. Inner hubs form based on the need for a centralized point of coordination and decision making for common functions.
4. Personnel decisions are never a driving factor in the formation of hubs or the overall IT infrastructure.
5. The design of the new organization must accommodate the ad hoc and ongoing creation of new hub structures on an as needed basis.

As far as creating a participant structure that supports participative design, the design team should consider the following approach.

1. The core design team should have representation from all major information management categories.
2. Functional units forming the outer hubs create local design teams to specify functional requirements for their respective areas.
3. As functions are grouped under various categories and sub-functions, newly formed hubs place a representative on a localized design team for their area.

Design teams stay intact for the length of their role in the project. Centralized hub teams can also help determine when peripheral teams need to be created and disbanded.