ABSTRACT
In addition to having some teams focused on running IT operations and others focused on application development, Boeing’s Hammonds has 10 percent of her team (which amounts to eight hundred out of her eight-thousand-person IT organization) working on specific customer contracts. “Whether it is with the army, navy, or Department of Defense, we have teams that are focused directly on revenue-generating work,” says Hammonds. That doesn’t make Hammonds’ organization a profit center. “We are still a cost center, but we are driving revenue flow to the business units.” Hammonds has been very deliberate about carving out these contract-focused IT teams. “I have learned from past experience that there needs to be some separation between operations and strategic work,” she says. “Because otherwise, people are so consumed with the running of the business that they can never focus on the future.”
