Next, Reorganize Your Department
Kellen also needed time to address his own organization's concerns. His staff believed it couldn't do the ERP upgrade without spending millions on external consulting. But after interviewing all 100 employees, Kellen came to a different conclusion: "We had plenty of people, some managers and some worker bees, with 10-plus years of experience, wickedly sharp minds and passion for pushing the future. We had everyone we needed."
But they just weren't where Kellen needed them to be. So he started on the org chart, devoting nearly a year to the effort. "The biggest element to enable innovation is the organizational design piece," says Kellen. "We spent 10 months in intense organizational design thought, and most of that was spent coming up with bad ideas."
Kellen finally organized the department around 14 crafts ("mutually exclusive, knowledge-intensive areas"), created a rotating team of five managing directors to coach the craft leaders who would serve six-to-nine-month terms, placed IT salespeople within the university, consolidated five IT departmental budgets into one and put a managing director in charge of it all.
Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.