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:
- Storage
- Compute
- Information Generation
- Scheduling & Orchestration
To succeed in these four areas of focus, there are capabilities that the technology organizations require:
- Infrastructure Engineering (both cloud-based and physical)
- Data Engineering
- Analytics Engineering & Data Science
- Software Development Engineering
- 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 storage, Lambda/EC2 for compute, AirFlow for scheduling and orchestration, and so on)
- Data Engineering enables storage, information generation and scheduling & orchestration
- Analytics Engineering & Data Science enables information generation
- Software Development Engineering enables compute, and information generation
- Technology Product Management enables all four areas by ensuring all the technology capabilities are brought to bear on a problem in the right order at the right time
From these areas and capabilities there are implied critical capabilities (or maybe more accurately systems) that a technology organization must have and support:
- robust documentation (both the infrastructure to store and the documentation itself)
- a ticketing system
- an asset tracking system
