When Marina Levinson joined NetApp as chief information officer, in 2005, the data storage business “had a very good IT operation for a $500 million company,” according to her. In reality, however, the company was already four times that large—and growing by 25 percent a year. Her primary task has been to build an IT organization that can help, rather than hinder, NetApp’s continuing fast-paced growth. As Levinson says, “You never want IT to show up in a quarterly report as the reason the company didn’t meet its revenue numbers.”

Soon after joining NetApp, Levinson assessed the IT organization’s capabilities and identified dozens of processes and activities in need of improvement. Launching a broad organizational transformation of the function was out of the question, given the need to scale it up quickly to remain in step with the growth of the business. Instead, she identified and then tackled concrete sets of high-value improvements. To ensure that they aligned with the company’s strategic direction, she adopted a governance model placing positions for key IT decision makers within the business units and appointed people who could help her ascertain whether IT resources were invested in the right projects.

The implementation of these...