Companies that specialise along the complexity dimension usually see IT as the domain of the individual specialist groups, each of who treats their use of IT as part of their particular expertise. Each specialist function within the organisation will define and deploy IT in the way which contributes best to what they see as their specialist role.

At the higher level these organisations primary expectation of IT is to ensure that the diverse separate specialist groups can communicate and share information to ensure the overall goal is met. This requires that they are all operating on a common set of data and that the various components that make up the whole are coherent and consistent.

Central support has difficulty in catering for the broad range of specialist applications that users involve themselves with. Its role in that application layer is therefore limited ito the technical support of off the shelf packages rather than supporting the users.

From an IT perspective this leads to data centric structures with which the centre imposes common data standards and provides and operates shared networks. IT operations and support is devolved to local support teams, however the ever growing shared data storage needs is encouraging the development of central data repositories.

The IT organisation in such organisations operates in many ways as if it were an ISP/Telecommunications provider.