Allen Weiner

As Yahoo enters the command and control part of its evolution, new CEO Carol Bartz sums up on the company’s blog the reason for a new, more centralized corporate structure: “Mention Yahoo! practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven’t been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo! brand stands for. We’re going to change that. Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.” Can we get an Amen?

The new structure speaks to Bartz’s former role as head of Autodesk, a software publisher, and her work at Sun Microsystems where a more centralized organization led to fewer layers of bureaucracy and more consistent decision making. This move is Bartz’s clear statement that she is not only in control, but she views information as power and places her in a prime position to be at the center of an ongoing informational hub. For Yahoo!, it marks the end of labyrinth of roles within products, technologies and marketing and ushers in a model of greater individual accountability (not to mention public and behind-the-scenes sniping). In addition, Yahoo spokespeople say Bartz was appalled at the way Yahoo interacted with its customers and is creating a new Customer Advocacy group whose head (yet to be named) will gather customer insights and synthesize them for use across the organization.

Specifically, the new org structure looks like this:

• Tech and Product groups will be combined to create a single organization called Products. Products will be led by Ari Balogh as EVP of Products and CTO, reporting to Carol Bartz. This organization is responsible for the vision, strategy, and quality of every product we create — regardless of region, device format or category.

• Instead of multiple regions, there will be now two regions – North America and International. The regions are responsible for delivering Yahoo!’s products, programming and services to consumers, partners and advertisers in local markets. North America will be led by Hilary Schneider, EVP, North American Region, reporting to Carol Bartz. International’s leader will be hired soon.

* In mobile, David Ko will lead the mobile business, strategy and monetization teams for Yahoo! (Head of Global Mobile Business, reporting to Hilary Schneider).

• A Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role has been created to oversee global marketing strategy and provide direction for our marketing function. The new CMO is Elisa Steele who was most recently with NetApps.

It’s worth calling out the deletion of regions and sub regions in the corporate structure. Only 30 percent of Yahoo!’s revenue comes from outside the U.S., so the company believes viewing their opportunity as two regions will allow them to have more uniform product messaging and product deployment. And while not a headline grabber, Yahoo! is creating a centralized Service Engineering & Operations (SE&O) team which will be chartered with delivering common technology services at scale, including application management and infrastructure. This should not only result in a cost savings but will allow the company to be more agile with a single point of internal technology governance.

Yahoo! followers are doing a light head scratch over the choice of Elisa Steele as CMO, wondering how a career at NetApps provides the expertise to work at Yahoo!. One school of thought would say marketing principles are uniform from one market to another; the other would be that there was a possible prior working relationship between Steele and Bartz during their time at Sun Microsystems. Also somewhat dampening the reorg message is the departure of Blake Jorgensen, Yahoo!’s CFO. Finding a suitable replacement will be crucial to keep Wall Street engaged and a believer in the company’s new direction.

So, what’s next? It would be great to be a fly on the wall in the Yahoo! cafeteria to gauge how the rank and file feels about the news. Yahoos should be glad to have a clearer, cleaner chain of command with management empowers rather than confuses its minions. The tale will not be told, however, until this shakeup actually results in some quick, market-changing offerings that gets everyone yodeling again.