When Amy Berkowitz became CIO of CBS in August 2001, she inherited an IT group organized by business units. That structure had worked well when there hadn’t been a lot of change in the company’s network television, TV station, radio and outdoor advertising businesses, or in the core technologies supporting them. But the world was going digital, and CBS needed to ready itself for consequent changes in workflow, distribution, advertising and sales.

CBS IT was already laudably efficient, running at about 50 percent of the cost of the average IT shop, according to Meta Group, yet Berkowitz realized that being efficient and effective was no longer enough. "There was a new set of metrics we needed to be prepared for: adaptability, speed and innovation. And the way we were organized, we were not going to be successful at any of those," she says. Berkowitz wanted her IT group to be more agile and closer to users, yet even more efficient. After a lot of homework, Berkowitz decided that a new organizational structure that was centered on small teams offered the most potential for achieving those seemingly conflicting goals. She rolled out the teams in January 2002.

Small teams are revered in software development and other technical fields for their absence of bureaucracy. Bill Gates, business author Tom Peters and Google CEO Eric Schmidt, among others, have lauded small teams as the ideal structure for getting good work done.

But how do small teams work in the IS department, where technical work is only part of the job and regular contact with business managers and users is paramount?

Elements of Small Teams

In moving from a line-of-business focus to what she calls a product-center focus, Berkowitz eliminated the need to have redundant groups working on the same kinds of applications. For example, instead of having four separate teams supporting finance and administration systems for the TV network, TV station, radio and outdoor advertising businesses, CBS now has a single group that handles such systems for the entire company. Four product area managers (reporting directly to Berkowitz) oversee each of the four kinds of software products that CBS uses: finance and administration, sales and traffic, programming and production, and interactive systems. Within each of these product areas, project managers coordinate three to five dedicated workgroups that handle all development and support.

So far, so good?but not much different from the typical centralization effort. The main feature of the new structure, however, is the 20 newly created workgroups. These are independent small teams each made up of four to seven people with complementary skills: one workgroup lead (who is a process specialist), one or more developers, one or more people responsible for testing and documentation, and one business analyst/architect whose job is to understand the business needs and relay that to the rest of the workgroup.