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Design Your AI Target Operating Model

Incorporate AI into your organization based on your current IT operating model.

Your organization has identified a slate of AI use cases and projects that are expected to deliver business value. You are tasked with building a plan to develop, deliver, and support AI across the enterprise, which requires you to:

  • Identify, assess, and implement required AI-related business and IT capabilities.
  • Identify the roles required to support those capabilities.
  • Establish decision-making rights and authority.
  • It’s not enough to simply create an isolated, siloed AI team. You must understand how AI roles and capabilities will fit in the context of your larger IT and organizational operating model.
  • What works for one organization may not work for another. You need to develop a solution that helps you deliver on your strategy in the context of your organization’s existing capabilities and structure.

Our Advice

Critical Insight

  • It’s not enough to simply create an isolated, siloed AI team. You must understand how AI roles and capabilities will fit in the context of your larger IT and organizational operating model.
  • IT organizations that successfully deliver AI projects are those that successfully integrate AI capabilities within their larger IT operating model.

Impact and Result

Use this methodology to:

  • Build a framework for incorporating AI skills and roles into your own organization, based on your strategic goals and your organization’s target technology operating model.
  • Identify the organizational capabilities needed in your organization to execute on key AI initiatives.
  • Define the roles required to support organizational capabilities related to AI.
  • Understand the role of AI within your organization.

Design Your AI Target Operating Model Research & Tools

1. Design your AI Operating Model Deck – A step-by-step guide to design AI capabilities in your organization.

Use Info-Tech’s methodology to create your organization’s AI capabilities map and organization structure.

Design Your AI Target Operating Model Storyboard

2. Operating Model Decision Tool – An Excel questionnaire to help organizations determine their current (or target) IT operating model.

Use this quick questionnaire to determine which Info-Tech general model best matches your future-state IT operating model. Use the general model identified as a starting point to create your organization’s AI incorporation framework.

IT Operating Model Decision Tool

3. AI Operating Model Sketchbook – Use these examples to design your own AI operating model.

This deliverable provides you with a set of AI roles and capabilities as well as example structures for all operating model archetypes to be used as reference for you to create your own.

AI Operating Model Sketchbook

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Design Your AI Target Operating Model

Incorporate AI into your organization based on your current IT operating model.

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

Your organization has identified a slate of artificial intelligence (AI) use cases and projects that are expected to deliver business value. You are tasked with building a plan to develop, deliver, and support AI across the enterprise, which requires you to:

  • Identify, assess, and implement required AI-related business and IT capabilities.
  • Identify the roles required to support those capabilities.
  • Establish decision-making rights and authority.

Common Obstacles

You will struggle to deliver on your objectives if:

  • AI teams are isolated from other teams in the organization.
  • You attempt to replicate another organization's operating model, without considering your own strategy and organizational context.
  • What works for one organization may not work for another. You need to develop a solution that helps you deliver on your strategy, in the context of your organization's existing capabilities and structure.

Info-Tech's Approach

  • Start with strategy. Confirm what you want to accomplish, before you try to define how you'll do it.
  • Identify an operating model that aligns to what you're expected to deliver through your strategy.
  • Identify key AI capabilities and roles, and where they typically sit within that model.
  • Use Info-Tech's templates and methodology to create a visualization of your AI operating model.

Info-Tech Insight

IT organizations that successfully deliver AI projects are those that successfully integrate AI capabilities within their larger IT operating model.

Develop, deploy, and support AI projects enterprise-wide

Generative AI has burst into the public consciousness, launching a race to discover and be first to market with golden use cases.

IT departments are struggling to support generative AI initiatives, as there's a limited supply and consequent high cost for key skills required to build, train, and support AI applications.

Your operating model can enhance or impede business ownership of key AI projects. If you fail to enable business ownership of AI projects, you will struggle to execute on your AI strategy and fail to realize expected value.

To be an organization that succeeds, you must design an operating model that supports your strategy and key initiatives, fits with your culture and organization, and makes the most of the skills and resources available to you.

With the right framework of incorporation, AI adoption can be less resource consuming.

65%

of respondents accelerated their existing AI strategy, or were forced to create a strategy, due to the advances in generative AI models in 2022
(Scale, 2023)

34%

of companies say that limited AI skills, expertise, or knowledge are a barrier to AI adoption
(IBM, 2022)

47%

of executives say it's challenging to integrate AI initiatives into existing processes and systems
(Veritone, 2020)

Research benefits

Use this research to design an initial AI operating model that will help you successfully incorporate AI within your IT operating model:

  1. Build a framework for incorporating AI skills and roles into your own organization, based on your strategic goals and your organization's target technology operating model.
  2. Identify the organizational capabilities needed in your organization to execute on key AI initiatives.
  3. Define the roles required to support organizational capabilities related to AI.
  4. Understand the role of AI within your organization.
  5. Successfully begin your organization's AI incorporation.

Successful AI incorporation can lead to multiple benefits, such as:

  • Improving time to market by speeding product innovation (Convercon, 2023).
    • Time to Market = Average product time to market before AI – Average product time to market post AI incorporation
  • Identifying missed strategic opportunities (Veritone, 2020).
  • Improving employee efficiency by allowing staff to focus on more meaningful work.
    • Employee Efficiency = (how long the task ought to take/how long the task takes)*100 – (how long the task ought to take/how long the task takes with AI processes in place)*100
  • Increasing profits by helping reduce costs and increase revenue (Mexico Business News, 2023).
An image showing the pathway from We have a mandate to deliver business value via AI use cases and projects; to How do we organize ourselves to deliver on our AI strategy?; to What questions will our initial AI operating model design help us answer?

Info-Tech's methodology

Step 1. Identify your IT target operating model

Step 2. Design your AI target operating model

Substeps

  • Review your AI strategy and roadmap.
  • Confirm which IT operating model best aligns to your strategy and roadmap.
  • Review key AI-related roles and capabilities.
  • Design an AI roles and capabilities within your target operating model.

Step Outcomes

  • Confirm your target IT operating model.
  • A list of needed AI-related roles and capabilities.
  • A sketch of your target organizational structure, outlining AI-related roles.

Guided implementation

What does a typical guided implementation (GI) on this topic look like?

Step 1: Identify your IT target operating model

Step 2: Design your AI target operating model

Call #1: Discuss your current state and review your drivers for developing your operating model. Review key elements of your AI strategy.

Call #2: Identify your target IT operating model.

Call #3: Review and define key AI roles and capabilities.

Call #4: Discuss how to build a capability map and draft an organizational sketch.

A GI is a series of calls with an Info-Tech analyst to help implement our best practices in your organization.

Step 1: Identify your target IT operating model

  1. Review Info-Tech's definition of an IT operating model after defining your AI strategy.
  2. Use Info-Tech's Operating Model Decision Tool to identify a general operating model you can customize to your own organization.

This step involves the following participants:

  • Core working group members

Outcomes of this step:

  • Identify your target IT operating model
Design Your AI Target Operating Model preview picture

About Info-Tech

Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.

We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.

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After each Info-Tech experience, we ask our members to quantify the real-time savings, monetary impact, and project improvements our research helped them achieve.

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What Is a Blueprint?

A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.

Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.

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Speak With An Analyst

Get the help you need in this 2-phase advisory process. You'll receive 4 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.

Guided Implementation 1: Identify your IT target operating model
  • Call 1: Discuss your current state and review your drivers for developing your operating model. Review key elements of your AI strategy.
  • Call 2: Identify your target IT operating model.

Guided Implementation 2: Design your AI target operating model
  • Call 1: Review and define key AI roles and capabilities.
  • Call 2: Discuss how to build a capability map and draft an organizational sketch.

Authors

Andrew Sharp

Abhishek Punjani

Contributors

  • Veer Hossain, Director, InfoWorks Inc
  • Judy Brown, Marketing Coordinator, InfoWorks Inc
  • Jeffrey Kramer, Executive Vice President-Digital Transformation, Aprio

Related Content: Organizational Design

Search Code: 103126
Last Revised: August 15, 2023

TAGS:

AI Incorporation, AI Adoption, AI Capabilities, AI Organization Design, AI Roles
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