IT centralization grows as approach to IT consolidation

Of interest to me this week: stories of how CIOs are approaching IT consolidation not just in the data center, but also in their organizations. It’s no surprise that flat or reduced budgets impel a leader to look at roles and processes to find efficiencies, and often, when you’ve already done this time and again, your next choice is a massive restructuring.

Often that means IT centralization: Organizations that moved IT out into the business units to get closer to users are finding, as the Salvation Army did, that bringing them back together makes more economic sense, especially given technologies to manage branch offices remotely. Then there’s the move to combine disparate IT units, as is the case in Tulare County in California, where Lee Root, IT division manager, merged two county IT departments. That’s not unlike what Stephen Fletcher set out to do for the state of Utah — combine 24 separate IT departments and 1,000 IT employees into one central IT unit. When we spoke to him in 2007, he expected the effort to take three years.

IT centralization is no small effort — as Tulare County’s Root says, “We had to merge two separate workflows, two separate IT systems, two separate policies and we had to find a new way to manage IT services” — and large enterprise mergers have many times that number of systems and policies. Indeed, there are many other considerations, as Susan Cramm, former Taco Bell CIO, writes in a piece on IT Centralization or Decentralization, and the answer isn’t always soup-to-nuts centralization. Still, evaluating your organization with some centralization in mind makes too much sense not to consider in these tough economic times, and I expect we’ll see a lot more of it.