5 Approaches to IT Department Structure
Smaller businesses tend to have a higher proportion of IT staff to other employees. A ratio of 1 IT person for every 18 staff is typical of companies with less than 500 employees. Compare this with 1:40 in companies with more than 10,000 employees.
What are the different ways you can approach the IT department structure as a small business owner? Which solution is right for your company?
Outsourced IT Department Structure
A serious option for your IT department is to not have one at all. It might seem to be counter-intuitive but that is the simplest IT department structure of all. Have a non-IT manager take responsibility for the management of the contract and you can have IT as a third party delivered service.
Managed IT services and support can cover everything from responding to user questions right up to proposing your IT strategy. The benefits of outsourcing IT are many and persuasive.
Smaller businesses sometimes find establishing and maintaining an in-house IT department inefficient. It’s a significant investment and it can take some time to achieve. Contracting with an outsourced IT services provider is quick and cost-effective.
IT staff can be expensive to recruit and even more expensive to keep. Keeping them up to date with constantly changing technology is costly. As your business changes, so your IT needs change and you constantly need new and different skills in the team.
Getting and keeping experienced people with up to date skills is much easier with an outsourced approach. As a smaller business, it may be more important to keep your focus on the core business rather than on IT support. Shop this site to learn how outsourcing lets you do that.
Multi-tasking IT
Start-ups and micro-businesses cannot realistically have an IT department or afford to contract out all their IT service needs. In this case, the classic solution is for people to have more than one role. One moment you are making a sale, the next you are making coffee for the team.
IT support is one of the tasks that is shared out among the team. Nobody can be a prima donna when it comes to essential support roles. You have to be able to turn your hand to multiple tasks if you are a small business.
One person has to learn how to maintain printers and another does back-ups of data. The whole range of essential IT support tasks can be trained out and shared. Some people will have preferences and talents and it’s as well to go with this to get maximum commitment and maintain standards.
This model can be supplemented by outsourced support and services. This is especially needed when real expertise is needed or if the workload gets too demanding. The IT capability can flex up or down and so keep costs under control.
In-house Generalist
As a small business gets bigger, it makes sense to become a little more formal about IT support. There’s a point at which having an IT professional makes sense. This role is by no means a specialist one but in fact, an IT generalist is probably the best description of the skill-set needed.
An IT generalist may have to turn their hand to any number of IT tasks from helping resolve user errors to software installation and hardware setups. Part of the role is to determine when their expertise is insufficient and more technical skills are needed. In some cases, the role might be as much to do with managing third-party IT support as delivering it directly.
The third-party could embed contractors in the organization under the day to day supervision of the in-house IT generalist. This can be an opportunity for knowledge transfer if new systems are being introduced. Support can be migrated from external experts to an internal generalist.
The natural progression for this IT department structure is to either grow the IT team internally or to make the in-house IT person more strategic. In the latter case, outsourced or managed IT services and support is performance managed by the in-house manager.
IT Hierarchy
The logical alternative to a managed IT services and support model for IT, is a full in-house IT team. In this case, a department hierarchy is established to cover all the knowledge and skills required to service and support IT in the business. This covers strategic planning, management, operations, and development.
The scope of IT support can be very broad. It includes disparate subject areas like virus protection, cybersecurity, data back-up, disaster recovery, procurement, hardware and software support. IT development can include systems analysis and design, programming and deployment.
It’s hard to imagine any IT solution that doesn’t have some element of change management associated with it. IT training, integration and project management can all be covered within an IT department hierarchy. The central IT department also needs its own line management hierarchy to manage and coordinate activity.
Business Partner Model
As an organization grows, even an internal IT function may not meet the business needs effectively. There is an alternative to a centralized IT department model that combines some of the strengths of centralization with the flexibility of decentralization. It’s known as a business partner or shared services model.
Each function in an organization, even a small one, has unique needs. A business partner model has an embedded IT professional in each function.
They provide some front-line support and services. These would include responses to frequently asked questions. Any issues that cannot be handled by the business partner are referred back to the centralized IT support department where specialized knowledge and skills are available on an internal consulting basis.
A hybrid approach to the business partner model uses the embedded business partners as a gateway to an external IT support service. They can triage issues, prioritize and performance manage the third-party IT support.
Your Structure
The right IT department structure for you depends on your organization size and maturity. It also depends on how extensive your IT infrastructure is. Consider how a managed IT service might enable you to deliver great IT support.
