Structure of an IT department

Now I am going to explain in short the Essence of ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library)

ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) is a framework designed to standardize the selection, planning, delivery, maintenance and overall lifecycle of IT services within a business. The goal is to improve efficiency and achieve predictable service delivery.

According to ITIL, the organizational structure of an IT department is unique to each organization and/or situation, although there is a common basis. In terms of design, the structure is determined from the start by the strategy of the service.

And of course factors such as the age of the company, culture, geographic locations and technologies used play a major role.

Suppose your company works completely in the Cloud*, so with Office 365 for example, then you don’t have to take care of backups, servers and the like.

To make this structure a success story, you need to clearly define all roles and responsibilities. It is inadmissible that a certain task does not fall under the responsibility of a certain position.

*explained in chapter cloud

Small VS Big

There are some differences between a big IT company and a small IT company

For example, in a small IT department, you don’t have a Database Administrator. This is the job of the sysadmins and the network admins.

The number of functions here is clearly limited, but the responsibilities are more extensive. This implies that you are less specialized, but have a broader knowledge.

Specific versus single task

• You take care of the SQL databases and nothing else (large company).
• Within a small company you will take care of the servers as well as the databases.

The segregation between different tasks is therefore much more pronounced within a large department than within a small one.

• Within a small company you have a broader but more general knowledge.
• At a large company you are a specialist within one subject.
• Also logical: the structure is more complex in a large company.