Research in progress: where are all the people? the curious case of one-person IT departments

In this paper, we present a research-in-progress study that examines the characteristics of IT-departments that consist of a single employee. Spurred by the findings of a master's student project, we examined the data from another study we had conducted that revealed that fully 44% of municipalities in a Scandinavian country have such one-person-departments. Our survey also revealed that these "departments" provide full service to the municipalities which are quite heavy users of IT services. The obvious question is "how is it possible for the apparently skeletal IT department to provide full service?" Have we stumbled upon a new form of organizing the IT function? In this paper, we aim to map such departments to the models and frameworks that appear in the IS literature. We plan to conduct a series of interpretive case studies to understand how and why this structure emerged and what implications this has for IT personnel employed in these departments and the IT service delivery for organizations.