The Basics of Rightsizing: The Key to an Effective IS Department

It is important for the information systems (IS) department to provide timely, quality assistance to its users as well as its senior managers, who often need detailed information to make critical business decisions. In most organizations, however, the IS department is often not positioned properly to perform this task. A model for allocating the responsibilities for managing IS resources to achieve the right-sized IS department is presented. The key principles are: 1. focusing on line management decision making, 2. providing clearly defined responsibilities, and 3. revising the structure of the IS department. These ideas are based on an extensive organizational evaluation of information needs that led to a 5-year strategy for deployment of IS resources at BellSouth Enterprises Inc (BSE). It is argued that an IS department should be recognized as an investment center that is held accountable for the same internal rates of return as other business units.