A New Role for the CIO: Reducing Complexity - Design and Simplicity
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1. Inefficient organizational design:
• Are there opportunities to consolidate similar functions or units (multiple help desks, for example)—physically, virtually or managerially?
• Are you clear about which functions should be close to your customers and users (such as applications development) and which should be centralized or offered as shared services (such as data centers)?
• How many managerial layers are there between the CIO and first-level IT professionals? Can layers be reduced and spans of control increased?
2. Product and service proliferation:
• Does your company regularly sunset or decommission products and services so that IT resources can be
redeployed on new products and services?
• Have you prioritized the IT products and services you provide to internal users and been tough about which services you can’t offer? For example, do you have a standard desktop suite and refuse to support nonstandard applications?
• How well do you test the impact of new applications, products and features on the overall performance of the network—and make sure that they integrate successfully into the existing architecture?
IT Management 
