[kevin_thibedeau]

> Ideally the IT department would take a step back, assess what the users (you the stakeholder) needs are, and provide the solutions.

This approach was taken with Lotus Notes. The ivory tower decided who could create and control a database. All it does is throw up bureaucratic barriers people will work around. How much of your company is dependent on bespoke Excel databases? What better tools can you empower the employees with to mitigate that risk?

[jac_no_k]

@cosmie provides a good model for IT organization to quickly bring supportable solutions. The principles behind Agile is to reach across these barriers / towers. These Experts are the product owners / users, the developers, and also includes UX designers, operations team, security team, and capacity team. This is ideal but realistically challenging to pull off.

A given Firm should also be providing a way for Shadow IT project to brought into the light, formally adopted and supported.

[cosmie]

It's deeply flattering that you read to the end of my rambling comment, let alone referenced it! :)

I happened to be exposed to that model at one of my first professional jobs, and it was such an incredibly effective and seemingly obvious organizational structure that I presumed it was normal. Every job I've had since then has just deepened my appreciation for the brilliance and skill of whatever executive team pulled that off, as I've realized just how rare it is.

Fascinatingly enough, the organizational structure of that giant, traditional company bore a striking resemblance to how a software architect would approach designing a modern SOA on a cloud platform. And when the same principles of an SOA were applied to the design of the organization itself, the same communication structures, advantages, and trade offs emerged.

Which makes sense. Organizations and software are incredibly similar systems, and the parallels between the two allow for pretty seamless transfer of principles, best practices, pitfalls, mental frameworks, optimization opportunities, and reference architectures between organizational design and software design. Which is probably one of the hidden strengths of tech founders and the companies they create, since they'll implicitly infuse their experience at software design into the way they design all aspects of their company, even if they don't recognize they're doing it. Which is a competitive advantage over traditional business leaders that likely only have exposure to standard organizational design practices/teachings.