A technology accelerator team should be its own department — its own stripe in the org chart. Critical problems get introduced when the team lives under a “service” oriented department like Operations, or a specific purpose-oriented team such as Fundraising, Communications, or Programs. And it must not be mixed with I.T., which is a separate area requiring separate skills and expertise.
That said, it’s common in many organizations to find technology platforms living under something like one of those other departments.
This is typically for understandable reasons. Most often, an organization’s investments in technology platforms such as web or CRM were driven by a single department getting fed up enough with the dysfunctional state of their technology systems that they decide they’re going to just fix it themselves. A Communications department finds itself in daily pain from their lackluster, outdated website, or a fundraising team is driven to utter exasperation by their lack of a coherent CRM to track relationships. So they muster the internal political will, secure a major budget allocation, find a development firm, and go through a painstaking process to build a new site, or adopt a new platform. They probably weren’t thrilled to be the ones doing it, and the results may be mixed, but afterwards at least it’s not as bad as it was before.
Then, understandably, that department intently guards that system going forward, protecting their territory against all who they fear might mess everything up again. They become the de facto owners and guardians. “You have no idea what we went through to even get this far,” they explain. “If you need something, you can ask us.”
But this fundamentally requires these departments to hold a core competency that is substantially outside their area of expertise. It’s too much to ask that a communications department be able to do web product management at the level a modern organization needs, or that a fundraising team include specialized CRM product management skillsets. Rather, if the organization is set up right, everyone should get to focus on their areas of expertise.
In addition, in today’s world, your technology platforms need to serve every department well, not just the one department that got frustrated enough to initiate that platform’s temporary renewal. A successful website must provide critical daily value and address high priority needs for departments across the organization. A CRM’s transformational potential lies in its ability to connect and track different areas across the organization’s work.
Planning, building, and continuously maintaining that level of strategic focus and technical quality is an extremely advanced undertaking! It simply can’t be done from within one specific ‘purpose-built’ department. And even when attempted at a much lower level of ambition, it pulls that department farther out of position, and makes it extremely difficult to do the critical work of prioritizing needs accurately across the organization.
Set up right, your Technology Accelerator Team is a make-everything-better team with a voracious appetite for improving everything around it. Allocating an independent department gives this team of crack improvers and problem-solvers the ability to bring their specialized, focused, strategic and tactical skillsets to bear working with teams across the organization, unencumbered by common structural limitations that otherwise hold them back. It allows them to fairly and strategically prioritize positive impacts across every part of the organization, and help transition your organization to a new level of technology proficiency.