A reader writes with a quandary that you, my loyal and dear readers, might be able to answer. I particularly like her first line–it makes me feel a bit like Obiwan Kenobi:
Sorry to bother you, but my web searches have failed and I don’t know where else to turn. Our general manager has just decided that our corporate website should be turned over to our IT department to be redesigned and managed. Our IT department doesn’t have the people, nor do they want the headaches, and we marketing types are not entirely incompetent at the whole web management thing.
What I’m hoping is that you, or your loyal readers, can point me to some articles or white papers or pretty much anything else discussing the folly of having a company website run by IT.
Bad idea jeans. Well, it depends who you’ve got in the IT department, but it’s generally unwise. Why? Paul Graham discusses one reason in Hackers and Painters.
He argues that you should outsource any part of your company that isn’t touched by customer pressure. That includes departments like IT, HR and, sometimes, graphic and web design. The IT department won’t be motivated to do a particularly good job, because they’re unlikely to be beholden to marketing and sales-related metrics.
That’s all I’ve got…any other suggestions?
DarrenBarefoot.com 
Personally I’d say “don’t worry about it”. You’re going to be fighting an uphill battle to try and keep it. Why not make yourselves available as a resource to the IT Department in this?
I know that as a long-time IT leader and director I’d have no problem managing the site, but as Darren said it’s really down to the people.
Either way, there’s not much sense fighting a battle you can’t win. Help out.
Any idea WHY it was moved? Most people are big fans of “if it ain’t broke” types of philosophies. Maybe your team did (or didn’t do) something which spurred this decision?
But, if this isn’t a failures-based decision, I’d definitely be looking at a spirit of cooperation. It’ll make you invaluable, cause less strife and headaches and build more solid bridges to IT – which is never a bad thing.
I’ve provided some suggestions for helping management see the website as a business case, instead of a pure technology issue.
See http://www.andreacoutu.com/page/blogone/79.
The questions are: Why is IT being assigned this job, and what does that say about how your organization views the website’s role?
Certainly there are usually people in IT departments who are skilled at coding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and managing web servers. But are the people in yours also good interaction designers or information architects? Do they have design skill? Can they build and maintain a website that is not only technically sound, but useful and valuable to your visitors? IT staff aren’t usually trained for that.
Does your general manager consider the website to be “done” (is that ever true?) and is it up to IT just to keep it running? Or is it just because it’s “a computer thing” that it’s now IT’s responsibility? Who’s been running it up to now, and what has prompted this change?
As the poser of the original question, I can answer a few of the questions posed above. Our IT department consists of 2 people – the manager and one admin guy who admits to having no interest in web design or maintenance. There’s no one who can code html, java, or CSS.
The motivation is purely political – marketing has had total responsibility for the site, working with an outside webmaster, but the department has fallen out of favour with a senior person who doesn’t want us involved in ‘his’ website at all (he also doesn’t want us doing ‘his’ packaging, ‘his’ advertising, or ‘his’ POP).
It’s not a question of co-operating with IT – we’d be happy to work with them but they don’t have the people to take on the work and really don’t want the responsibility. IT is completely on side with marketing.
Fortunately, the senior person in question is only responsible for the US operations, so we’re trying to make a case to at least keep marketing involved in the Canadian side of the equation.
IT, Marketing Or Sales Department? More Questions To Keep You Up At Night
Let them run the box, the CMS, the databases… have marketing do the front end, the online marketing, and the strategy.
It sounds to me like the senior manager involved doesn’t want the Marketing department to do any actual marketing, so there are bigger problems than what’s happening to the website.
Just because IT may have the technical skills to handle the task does not make them the best choice for tackling it. Your web site is a critical component of your image. Does the CEO want the company’s image to be similar to his IT folks image? Sorry I can not provide support in the form of a white paper.
It’s not a white paper, but some time ago Lou Rosenfeld solicited for reasons why Information Architecture is necessary.
Derek hits the nail on the head in his first comment above when he says that IT staff are not usually trained as interaction designers or information architects. I would go a step further and say that IT staff are usually (inadvertently) trained to be bad interaction designers and information architects. The factors they care most about are in tension with the factors that IDs and IAs care most about.
Derek is right – you have a bigger problem than what department to host website responsibilities in. You need to figure out why the senior exec is upset with your department and work to fix it.
The best solution is to first approach him, then set a meeting with him and his superior to work out the difference. I would also develop a cost/benefit document for moving the site to IT’s control — coauthored by the IT team to avoid accusations of marketing bias.