Designing a High-Performing Technology Organization

Overview

Today we will discuss how to organize a high-performing technology organization within a business. We will discuss the key verticals you likely will need in your business, important tenets for how you run the technology organization and common pitfalls that I’ve both seen others and myself make. Before we talk about these, we first need to talk about what a technology organization even does.

The Reason For Being

Technology is a powerful enabler for organizations; powerful but expensive, complicated and time consuming. I generally think of technology as having four (4) areas of focus:

1. Storage
2. Compute
3. Information Generation
4. Scheduling & Orchestration

To succeed in these four areas of focus, there are capabilities that the technology organizations require:

1. Infrastructure Engineering (both cloud-based and physical)
2. Data Engineering
3. Analytics Engineering & Data Science
4. Software Development Engineering
5. Technology Product Management (TPM)

There is a relationship between these five (5) capabilities and the four (4) areas of focus:

• Infrastructure Engineering enables all four areas by building the infrastructure necessary for each one (e.g., AuroraDB, Redshift for…