READING NOTE · UPDATED 2026
Bring systems thinking to the IT division
The original article and recovered PDF examine IT at an organisational level. Read the presentation as a dated argument, then connect it to current product ownership, funding and decision flow. A reorganisation should make a particular outcome easier to achieve. Use evidence about queues and dependencies to evaluate that claim.
A practical next step
- Open the original IT Division Refactored presentation.
- Choose one organisational constraint from your own work.
- Record the proposed change and the evidence needed to review it.
Richard Durnall: biography, career and publications →
This 2026 reading note is written by the Durnall editorial team. Richard Durnall’s original text follows below.
Historical references checked in 2026
The original words remain below. References without a verified useful destination are plain text rather than links to an error or unrelated website.
- JAOO conference: The event address has an invalid HTTPS certificate; no security exception is required to read the presentation PDF on this site.
Original publication: .
Original WordPress feed timestamp, UTC; the old theme’s local date may differ. Check the date source ↗
The original words below retain their period and attribution. The reading note above is the current editorial addition.
Source capture · 2009-11-02 ↗I’m in Aarhus, Denmark at the moment for this years JAOO conference. I got here on Tuesday after 36 hours travel from Melbourne. Urgh. The conference has been great; there are some amazing speakers here (Mary Poppendieck, Dave Thomas, Michael Feathers, Linda Rising, Martin Fowler, Bob Martin) and the whole place has an amazing buzz to it - I’d strongly recommend this conference.
I’ve been nervous about my presentation at JAOO for a while, mainly because the audience is filled with hard-core programmers and I tend to talk about more of the management aspects of IT. It turns out that the there is definitely an audience for my work here though; from the feedback I’m guessing somewhere around 150 people attended my talk and the response has been very positive so far.
My talk is brand new and has the title ‘The IT Division. Refactored’. I’ve just uploaded it the the presentations page of the site. The theme of the talk is built around IT divisions having a systemic problem - if we look at the numbers it’s clear that we can change the people, the country, the industry, the market etc. and still get the same repeatably poor results. I then start to introduce systems management theory and talk about how that can be used to rebuild IT divisions to work in fundamentally different ways. I look at organisational structure, processes, culture and people capabilities and walk through the approaches I’m taking to move towards more systems based operating models for IT. If you take a look at the deck then let me know your thoughts…