Are you changing any team structures or organizational models that you relied on in previous years? What are you reevaluating to ensure organizational agility?

Our business is young, and we are acquiring companies, so there has been a fundamental shift in our organization. You might start out with a cool-looking IT group, but then realize you need to dedicate an M&A group because of the time, effort, and capacity required to integrate companies. The rinse-and-repeat model is fine, but we’re learning as we go and are pulling capacity out of “run the business” operations to focus on integration.

It’s always ever-changing, and I never settle into one organizational structure for long. Right now, it’s very organic. We’re looking at leadership, identifying subject matter experts and individual contributors, and determining which teams need to gather consistently and dedicate focus to getting M&As done properly while continuing to run the business. It’s always a challenge, especially with a small team, to pull people away for new initiatives while keeping everything else running.

We are always trying to stay ahead and train our teams before taking on new responsibilities, but sometimes we get thrown into unexpected situations. For example, when COVID hit, I was told to get out of our data center much sooner than planned and move everything to the cloud. That forced us to quickly adapt, retrain, and reorganize. I hired a new leader for the cloud team to help skill up the staff, and I’m also working to consolidate from five cloud platforms down to two.

Last August, I did a complete reorg because I noticed silos—teams would toss problems back and forth without collaborating. Now, I’ve put teams together and made it clear that everyone needs to work side by side to solve problems. The difference between network and infrastructure in the cloud is not that significant anymore, so I’m really pushing integration. We still want to maintain skill sets internally, but I also question whether it’s effective to keep a large team when vendors can handle much of the work. For example, I already have vendors managing equipment installs and monitoring, so my internal team is mostly focused on patching devices. I’m constantly evaluating whether to keep functions in-house or outsource them.

We review our organizational structures annually and try to anticipate what roles we will need. We constantly change our staffing model and what we require each year for our headcount budget, as well as what skill sets, we think we can either train for internally or need to hire externally. Many of the same conversations I’m hearing in the group around compliance and regulatory requirements apply to us, with a strong focus on data. I agree with others that you have to start with data—unless you have your arms around that, innovation is irrelevant. We take it a year at a time and don’t look too far ahead because the pace of innovation today makes it almost impossible to plan further out. Yes, we have strategic objectives, but it’s a balancing act between supporting the business’s wants and needs and maintaining the underlying infrastructure that makes our platform scalable, stable, safe, and secure.

There isn’t a silver bullet when it comes to organizational structure; it depends on what you’re dealing with and your business’s appetite for delivery. You can’t just take someone else’s win and apply it—you have to learn it yourself. We constantly revisit and readjust our approach.