Before digging in, I think it’s important to set context. I am a business architect for Microsoft’s internal IT organization, also known as MSIT. MSIT is made up of three key organizations- the solution delivery group, the engineering group, and a services/operations group.
I work in the solution delivery organization, whose function is to provide account management between the business and IT, to facilitate and drive the planning of the IT investment portfolio, to gather business requirements and deliver them to our engineering group, and to otherwise ensure successful delivery of IT to our clients. The engineering organization, which is made up of both business aligned and non-business aligned teams, is responsible for the system development and enhancement while the services/operations group is responsible for running the infrastructure, handling service requests. The shorthand understanding of the difference between groups is Plan, Deliver, Operate.
The solution delivery groups are aligned to particular businesses or business areas; my solution delivery organization supports five sales and marketing lines of business. As with most large, global businesses, their business maturity and the relationship our IT group has with them is varied. While most of our group is focused on account management and business analysis functions, I work on a team whose responsibility is to develop strategic and investment plans for all of our business clients.
How Microsoft funds IT has a significant impact on my role and the dynamics of the business-IT relationship. IT’s budget is set at the corporate level and doled out across several funding governance bodies. The governance bodies are made up of senior leaders from business and IT organizations. These committees are chaired by the solution delivery leader – my general manager. Although all of our business clients are represented on the governance committee, not all of them have a seat at the table when decisions are made about how funds get allocated. As you might imagine, this can cause some friction in an environment where IT budgets are static or shrinking and there is more demand than investment dollars for supply.
My organization and the governance body that we facilitate operate from the premise that there is enough similarity in IT needs of our clients that we can create systems that are shared by two or more businesses. My team is focused on answering the question – how can we drive the most value from our IT portfolio? Where should we build for economies of scale versus creating capabilities that are specific to the needs of a particular client? How do we decide which investments will deliver the best results? Hopefully these are questions that resonate with you – how we tackle this question is the subject of this blog.
Comments