7 ways to restructure IT for maximum productivity

Efficiency, flexibility, and imagination are the keys to unlocking maximum IT productivity. Achieving intelligent restructuring requires a strong commitment to innovation as well as a willingness to try new and creative approaches to daily operations.

Is your organization ready to embrace creative restructuring to boost long-term productivity? Here are seven ways to you can get started.

1. Focus on business value

Stop organizing IT around functions and begin focusing on business value, advises Kelly Raskovich, an associate director at Deloitte Consulting. “Productivity doesn’t come from redrawing boxes on an organization chart,” she states. “It comes from changing how technology work gets prioritized, funded, built, and scaled.”

Focusing on business value means transitioning to product and platform-based teams that are aligned to the enterprise’s most important outcomes. Raskovich says Deloitte’s research describes this shift as moving from “keeping the lights on” to “lighting the way forward.” Once this model is in place, CIOs aren’t just running systems, they’re helping shape strategy.

AI makes such a shift even more urgent, Raskovich says. “If AI is simply bolted onto fragmented processes, organizations may get more activity without achieving meaningful scale,” she warns. “The productivity gain comes from embedding AI into architecture, delivery, operations, and decision-making, supported by reusable platforms, strong data foundations, and clear governance.”

2. Solve problems by consolidating key teams

Combine your security, technology, engineering, and architecture teams, advises Jeremy Koppen, CISO at consumer credit reporting firm Equifax.

“For instance, when you treat security as an accelerator instead of a gatekeeper, you’ll remove the daily friction that slows the business down,” he says. “We move at the speed of development, supporting our teams in securely launching a record 180-plus new product innovations in 2025.”

Koppen says C-level executives can also drive productivity simply by shifting the organizational mindset from “just completing the initiatives” to evaluating whether the initiatives will solve their problems. “This has always been true in security and technology, but with the current speed of AI development, it’s an absolute mandate today,” he says. “A security or technology roadmap built in December might be partially obsolete by April.”

3. Seek domain depth and better mentoring

Chase Snuffer, CIO at Texas-based not-for-profit Rayburn Electric Cooperative, recommends breaking IT teams into independent subdepartments. “Over the past three years we’ve reorganized IT into five subdepartments: development, networking, cybersecurity, information assurance, and IT operations.”

Prior to the transition, IT was organized into several small, self-contained teams, including a network engineer, two IT ops staffers, a help desk manager, and single cybersecurity and information assurance professionals stretched across multiple groups. While each team could operate independently, the structure created silos, Snuffer says. “Teams didn’t have to collaborate to achieve their goals, which led to different practices and priorities,” he says. “It also made it difficult to backfill employees who were on vacation or sick since each team worked differently.”

The reorganization created greater depth within each domain, Snuffer says. “Our networking team, for example, now has five people, ranging from an architect with seven to ten years of experience to junior administrators with one to two years. This structure naturally enables mentoring within each group while encouraging collaboration across functions,” he explains.

A revamped physical layout reinforces team cooperation. “Our IT department, for instance, shares an open space with cubes, a conference room, and whiteboards on the walls,” he says. “Collaboration happens both formally and organically.”

4. Focus on the workflow, not the org chart

A significant productivity loss is the result of organizational friction rather than individual performance, says Andy Miears, a partner with technology research and advisory firm ISG.

“Recurring problems such as unclear ownership, competing priorities, excessive handoffs, and decisions being reopened after work has begun can consume significant delivery capacity,” he states. “Reducing that friction often creates more value than simply asking teams to work faster.”

Miears suggests focusing on the workflow, not the organization chart. “Select a high-value business domain or value stream, trace how demand moves from idea through prioritization and delivery, and identify where decisions, queues, approvals, and handoffs are slowing throughput.”

5. Inventory and monitor key assets

Sort your inventory by function rather than by vendor or budget line, advises Anita Williams Woolley, a professor of organizational behavior and theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “The pattern that will then emerge is usually a redundancy in memory, gaps in reasoning, and confusion in attention.”

Woolley says it’s also essential to adopt a disciplined process for introducing, managing, and retiring tools. “An enormous amount of time is lost to simple ambiguity about which tool or channel a given project is supposed to use, so retiring tools is just as important as introducing new ones.”

6. Form crossfunctional teams for end-to-end ownership

Many organizations still operate in silos, such as infrastructure, applications, security, data, and operations, says Yogesh Joshi, senior vice president, global AI platforms, at CISO at consumer credit reporting firm TransUnion. “While this model creates specialization, it can also introduce handoffs, competing priorities, and delays that slow the delivery of business outcomes.”

Joshi believes a more effective approach is to establish cross-functional product teams that own a specific business capability end-to-end. “These teams bring together product management, engineering, data, security, and operations around a shared mission with common success metrics,” he explains.

To support the teams, organizations should build centralized platform capabilities that provide reusable services for data, security, identity, governance, and AI. “This enables product teams to move faster while maintaining consistency, control, and scale.”

As AI becomes deeply embedded within enterprise workflows, a cross-functional team model allows organizations to combine human expertise, automation, and intelligent decision-making in a way that improves both productivity and business outcomes, Joshi says.

7. Team up for power problem-solving

Tim Haider, CEO of Remote Job Assistant, agrees that IT teams will generate improved productivity when shifted from traditional departments into small cross-functional groups that own a specific business outcome. “Allow engineering, security, operations, data, and product specialists to solve problems together instead of passing work between isolated teams.”

Moreover, such a structure allows teams to share clear goals while providing measurable outcomes and direct accountability, Haider says, thereby cutting approval delays, reducing duplicated efforts, and keeping technical decisions tied to customer and business value rather than internal priorities.