Design the IT Infrastructure & Operations Organization of the Future

Review your strategy, structure, skills and staffing.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst perspective

Start with the end in mind.

IT Infrastructure & Operations leaders are facing more change today than we’ve seen in years. Technologies are changing exponentially, bringing with them a need for new skills, sometimes new roles, and new ways of working.

Adapting to the change can feel impossible when I&O teams are already underwater, struggling to keep pace with day-to-day break-fix, last-minute projects, and operational work. It’s hard to build a strategic approach that addresses the needs of today and the needs of tomorrow, too.

The right-sized, practical tool kit you’ll find in this methodology will help you build a forward-looking organizational structure, skills sourcing plan, and staffing gap analysis to prepare your team and organization to adapt to change.

Andrew Sharp

Research Director,
Infrastructure & Operations
Info-Tech Research Group

Executive summary

Your Challenge

Your business’ appetite for new technology is outpacing the Infrastructure & Operations team’s ability to deliver:

• Current skill sets haven’t kept up with the latest technologies or organizational mandates.
• Staffing levels aren’t allowing you to meet organizational needs.
• I&O isn’t well aligned with the business or the other areas of IT.

Common Obstacles

You’re not sure where to start:

• Making changes to one part of your team or function can have cascading effects in other parts of I&O, IT, or the organization.
• Trying to force the organization to operate the wrong way can do lasting damage to engagement, retention, SLAs, and business value.
• Existing theories for team and organizational design don’t always feel like a good fit for the Infrastructure & Operations team.

Info-Tech’s Approach

Use our methodology to:

• Document, evaluate, and redesign your operating model to help you achieve your documented strategy and goals.
• Evaluate current skill sets and staffing levels and identify gaps as you move forward to implement changes.
• Leverage other Info-Tech research and products to support cultural change, skills training, benchmarking, and more.

Info-Tech Insight

It’s not just the skills gap holding you back. Pair your skills upgrade with a fresh look at your structure and staffing to ensure work flows smoothly, accountability is well defined, and capacity is sufficient to maximize the value of the change.

Everyone has a skills gap

Your business’ appetite for new technology is outpacing your team’s ability to acquire needed skills

• Most organizations are getting out of the business of running their own data center, unless they have a compelling reason to do so.
• Technology is changing very quickly, and unless you can abstract underlying layers it becomes very difficult to adopt those changes in your organization rapidly, responsibly, and securely.
• Across every major survey, a major obstacle to transformation is a lack of qualified skills and resources to support the design, implementation, and management of a new technology stack.

“A common theme across every Infrastructure & Operations leader I work with is the skills gap in their organization that’s preventing them from taking action on their cloud strategy.”
– Justin St-Maurice, Technical Counselor, Info-Tech Research Group

30% of respondents said talent and skills remain a key barrier to cloud adoption.
Source: Foundry, 2024

75% of survey respondents said a lack of resources or expertise was a challenge for cloud management.
Source: Flexera, 2025

A lack of needed skills was the most commonly cited contributing factor to avoidable and wasteful cloud spend, with 41% of all organizations citing a skills gap as a problem.
Source: HashiCorp, 2024

38% of organizations said a lack of training was an obstacle to container use, up from 28% in 2023.
Source: “Cloud Native 2024,” CNCF, 2025

You need to address more than the skills gap

If the problem is a lack of skills and resources, why not just train, contract, and hire to address the gaps you have now?

• A skills acquisition plan is necessary, but you need to be more forward-looking than just patching skills gaps you have today.
• Internal teams have to make time and secure funding to pursue training. Your skilled resources have to be motivated to learn new skills in the first place, or no amount of training budget will help.
• Even if you have budget for it, new hires and contractors don’t know your organization or technology stack as well as seasoned resources do and typically will have a longer ramp time to get to value.
• If you acquire new skills, they need to be in the right place to deliver value: you need to align key skills with accountabilities and work.
• Technologies like IaaS, containers, and automation platforms require new ways of working to maximize the value they deliver. There may be work you’re doing now that you really don’t need to do anymore.

Info-Tech’s approach to future-proof the I&O function

The Challenge:

As the IT Infrastructure & Operations leader, you need to prepare the people who report to you to meet the needs of future technology and organizational demands.

Phase 1: Review Your Strategy

• Drivers for Change and Expected Outcomes
• Risks and Blockers
• Key Stakeholder Map and Engagement Plan

Phase 2: Evaluate Your Structure

• Current and Target-State Organization Diagrams

Phase 3: Assess Skills and Staffing Gaps

• Skills Gaps & Sourcing Plans
• Current and Future-State Staffing Gaps
• Roadmap and Action Plan

The Outcome:

A clear plan of action that addresses quantified gaps and will enable the I&O organization to meet the needs of the future.

Key Insight

It’s not just the skills gap holding you back. Pair your skills upgrade with a fresh look at your structure and staffing to ensure work flows smoothly, accountability is well defined, and capacity is sufficient to maximize the value of the change.

Qualify and track project benefits

Benefits for IT & example metrics

• Deliver on key initiatives that require significant I&O support.
  • Project success rate: Percent of top projects with significant I&O involvement that are on time, on budget, and in scope.
• Align key processes and accountabilities for better ownership and ultimately better execution across I&O.
  • Accountability coverage: Percent of key processes with an identified owner
  • Process effectiveness: Effectiveness score for all key I&O processes (e.g. out of five, as rated by the CIO)
• Avoid unnecessary rework by following this structured, best-practice methodology.
  • Person-hours saved: Estimate time saved through not needing to build templates, define methodology, etc.
  • Decision-making time reduction: Poll key stakeholders post-project to gather feedback on whether the decision-making process went faster.

Benefits for the business & example metrics

• Realize the technology transformation with an I&O organization that is ready to deliver on key transformation projects rather than an afterthought that blocks business value.
  • Expected return on transformation investment: ROTI = (Ve – IT)/IT
    where Ve is the expected organizational value of transformation and IT is the investment in transformation
• Quality, throughput, or cost improvements enabled by organizational restructuring, upskilling, or staffing gaps addressed:
  • Increased deployment frequency: Number of production releases per week
  • Decreased change failure rate: [Failures / Total Deployments] * 100%
  • Decreased infrastructure spend per user: Infrastructure Costs / Users

Info-Tech’s methodology for I&O design

Insight summary

It’s not just the skills gap.

Pair your skills upgrade with a fresh look at your structure and staffing to ensure work flows smoothly, accountability is well defined, and capacity is sufficient to maximize the value of the change.

Start with the end in mind.

You need to identify the destination before you can map the best route to get there.

Prioritize impact.

Focus on areas of the organization where change will have the most significant impact, rather than the areas that may change the most. Concentrate your effort in the areas where you can have the most benefit.

Staff for change.

You’ll likely be straddling the old environment and the new for some time. Ensure your capacity plan accounts for the disruption and added work that the team will have to support while they’re stuck in the middle of the change from old to new.

A picture’s worth a thousand words.

Avoid lengthy prose-heavy documents to describe required organizational changes. Instead, use diagrams that are easier to create and more likely to be read.

Good data paints the right picture.

Support your vision of the future-state organization with data on needed skills and staffing.

Phase 1

Review Your Strategy

Phase 1

1.1 Strategy drivers

1.2 Other drivers

1.3 Alternative tactics

1.4 Key stakeholders

1.5 Pre-mortem

Phase Outcomes

• Identify drivers for change and the key stakeholders to change.
• Pinpoint any critical risks or blockers and what to do about them.

Transformation is in demand and I&O can’t keep up

It’s not just the skills gap

• Surveys show that a lack of skills on new systems is a barrier to adopting new technologies.
• At the same time, an inability to get off legacy technologies is seen by the vast majority of executives as a drag on business agility.
• Skills are a key gap, but not the only one.
• Most organizations change themselves – often adding new roles or functions – during or after a major technology transformation.
• You need a holistic approach that aligns structure, skills, and staffing to your strategic roadmap.

30%

30% of respondents said talent and skills remain a key barrier to cloud adoption.
Source: Foundry, 2024

94%

94% of executives believe legacy infrastructure is greatly hindering their business’ agility.
Source: NTT Data, 2024

81%

81% of organizations have added new roles and functions as a result of their cloud investments.
Source: Foundry, 2024

Prepare yourself with a bold vision of the future

The following research will help you conduct a deep dive into your expected future state:

• Speak to current and emerging technology trends and identify which trends are a priority for your organization:
  • Tech Trends & Priorities Research Center
  • Exploit Disruptive Infrastructure Technology
• Describe the business-aligned strategy for IT, Infrastructure, and Operations:
  • Build a Business-Aligned IT Strategy
  • Build a Strategic Infrastructure Roadmap
  • Create a Service Management and IT Operations Strategy

1.1 Summarize your strategy and technology plans

1.5 hours

Outline the future state of your organization and IT department in a facilitated discussion before you start to work on design activities.

We strongly recommend you document key points from these discussions. They’re a key reference as you work through the rest of the exercise.

1. Summarize the wider organization’s strategy and direction. If possible, have a senior executive present this direction to the working group.
2. Summarize IT’s and I&O’s role in supporting the business strategy.
3. Identify key technology changes you expect in the next few years. List key projects and initiatives that are happening within or will impact the I&O organization.
4. Create a shortlist of the ways your strategy and technology roadmap are driving change in the I&O organization.

1.1 Example: Strategy-Based Drivers for Change

Strategy-Based Drivers for Change

• Business Strategy: Drive digital-first banking; double SMB lending; implement repeatable, data-driven compliance; and cut cost-to-income to 55% by 2028.
• IT’s and I&O’s Role: Deliver 99.99% uptime on critical user-facing systems; support pipelines for real-time data and decisioning; support API-ready core services; develop self-service and auto-remediation.
• Technology Horizon: Open-banking APIs; real-time payments infrastructure; AI underwriting; cloud services; AIOps.
• Major Initiatives and Roadmap: Core replatform; CCaaS rollout; Databricks lakehouse; SD-WAN for 120 branches.

Required Organizational Changes to Respond to Drivers

• Build skill sets and capacity to move and support workloads on SaaS or a secure and scalable cloud platform.
• Build skills, knowledge, and tool sets that support secure development practices.
• Work more closely with the data, analytics, and BI teams to support effective data pipelines.
• Redirect resources toward automation and self-service.
• Review accountabilities for cloud spend to enable FinOps best practices for cloud optimization.

1.2 Identify other drivers for change

30 minutes

Strategy aside, are there other reasons you need to make changes to your I&O organization? See the next slide for an example.

1. List the challenges I&O is facing today. For example:
   • High turnover, challenges recruiting qualified staff
   • Challenges with upskilling and training
   • Cultural or management challenges
2. List the opportunities you think could be unlocked by investing in the I&O organization today. For example:
   • Acquiring talent with key skills would enable us to deliver service at the levels required by the business.
   • Identifying accountability for key tasks (e.g. DR, change control, request management) in the changing technology environment can clarify roles, reduce rework and friction, and ultimately drive better outcomes.
3. How could or should the organization change to address challenges and seize opportunities? List key ideas.

1.2 Example: Current Drivers for Change

Current Drivers for Change (Current Challenges and Opportunities)

• Rapid year-over-year growth: The company, customer count, and employee count have all grown, resulting in increased demand on technology resources and service support.
• High levels of disengagement: We believe low engagement is resulting in lower productivity and employee turnover.
• Skills gap: We believe we are lacking key skills and headcount to deliver appropriate service.
• Unclear accountability: It’s unclear who’s accountable for certain key tasks.
• New technology appetite: There is a high demand for new technologies to support productivity and user experience.

Required Organizational Changes to Respond to Drivers

• Identify where and how the I&O organization needs to grow to support growing demand.
• Improve engagement tracking and employee recognition programs.
• Identify and assign key accountabilities, and ensure the accountable party is able to deliver on those accountabilities.

1.3 Identify alternate or complementary tactics

30 minutes

Discuss where organizational changes need to be complemented by other changes.

1. List other ways to address the drivers you’ve identified in the previous two activities.
2. List any complementary tactics that would help support organizational changes.
3. Identify any change drivers that can’t be addressed by changes to structure, skills and/or staffing and any other tactics that can help move the organization to its desired state.

Leverage other Info-Tech research to support organizational change

• Enable a culture that embraces and celebrates innovation and acknowledges the need for change:
  • Optimize IT Governance for Dynamic Decision-Making
  • Design and Sustain a Purposeful IT Culture
• Use our world-class training programs to develop your leaders of tomorrow:
  • Adaptive IT Leadership Development Program
  • Management Fundamentals
• Work with your HR team or PMO to support organizational change management as you roll out changes to the organization. If this capability doesn’t exist in your organization, use the best practices from this research:
  • Adopt Change Management Practices and Succeed at IT Organizational Redesign
• Our benchmarking data offers insights into staff and spending at other firms in the industry to inform your staffing and investment decisions.
  • IT Staff & Spend Benchmarking Service

1.4 Identify your key stakeholders

30 minutes

Identify your key stakeholders and decide how to engage them before you start design work.

1. List the project’s key stakeholders (typically by role). This might include members of your organization, the CIO, other IT leaders, end users, developers, and other business leaders.
2. Evaluate their interest in the project and their influence over the project. Plot each group on a 2x2 matrix. (See example at right.)
3. Identify when and how you’ll engage, particularly with groups in the top two boxes. Consider whether to include members of these groups in the subsequent design exercises.
4. Revisit this list if you make decisions that could change the level of interest or influence of any of these groups.