IT and Marketing
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
Trust me you dont want to work for Marketing people, because you might win the argument with Management people sometimes, but no way with Marketing people. Management will make you do half baked products at gun point, while Marketing will make you do false products and you will never know, becuase they have tounge instead of gun. :laugh: And you will end up creating lot of different version of a same product, instead of creating a single flexible/configurable product. :doh:
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We have web developers (designers) working in marketing. These are solely responsible for 'look and feel', graphics (photoshop work etc to create banners and what not), all front stuff. In terms of Infrastructure, code and development, deployment - that all sits with our IT department and goes through a change control process. The Marketing department would have to 'sign off' on a deployment, but that responsibility sits solely with us. That's not a bad way to go about it. 'Look and feel' is such a fickle area, they change their mind constantly & I'd rather have someone close to them that can knock up the designs, then send them on to us for implementation. I think if you've got actual programmers working in Marketing, IT & all deploying - who's responsible for what? Could get somewhat messy, finger pointing & blame game! :)
Dylan Morley wrote:
I think if you've got actual programmers working in Marketing, IT & all deploying - who's responsible for what? Could get somewhat messy, finger pointing & blame game!
Yes, that's what I'm afraid of. We have found ourselves in a power struggle with marketing, and our CEO, who admits he is ignorant of technology, seems to have already decided in their favor and is listening to IT as a formality, or just a curteousy. Marketing thinks the problem is with the web technology we're using, and thinks we can change it to a different platform in a different language than we have internal expertise and it'll be no more trouble than changing their socks, or trading in a car for a new one. Thanks for your input!
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
Tell them they can have their programmers if they provide the IT department with cheerleaders in return.
There is only one Vera Farmiga and Salma Hayek is her prophet! Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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I think that is a great solution for companies with big bureaucracy. Probably, the Marketing people got fed up with trying to get IT do some work for them. This way they can control their own projects. I have seen it happen in a few companies and it worked well for them.
Our company doesn't have what I'd call a big bureaucracy. We have less than 140 employees.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
Probably, the Marketing people got fed up with trying to get IT do some work for them. This way they can control their own projects.
That is true in our case. I think it is a problem for many companies, as was atested in a recent panel discussion we attended last week where the panelists were from big corporations who had this same problem, their marketing departments were setting up what they called Shadow IT departments.
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
I have seen it happen in a few companies and it worked well for them.
I'd like to know how they divided up and enforced the roles and responsibilities, how they controlled data integrity being written back to the legacy databases from the "wild" programmers in marketing.
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Trust me you dont want to work for Marketing people, because you might win the argument with Management people sometimes, but no way with Marketing people. Management will make you do half baked products at gun point, while Marketing will make you do false products and you will never know, becuase they have tounge instead of gun. :laugh: And you will end up creating lot of different version of a same product, instead of creating a single flexible/configurable product. :doh:
Well said, and I would rather remove that joke icon; decreases the weight of what you said :)
Manas Bhardwaj Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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Trust me you dont want to work for Marketing people, because you might win the argument with Management people sometimes, but no way with Marketing people. Management will make you do half baked products at gun point, while Marketing will make you do false products and you will never know, becuase they have tounge instead of gun. :laugh: And you will end up creating lot of different version of a same product, instead of creating a single flexible/configurable product. :doh:
Good points. I don't think the marketing team could possibly understand the dev lifecycle.
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. " — Hunter S. Thompson My comedy.
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Tell them they can have their programmers if they provide the IT department with cheerleaders in return.
There is only one Vera Farmiga and Salma Hayek is her prophet! Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
Deyan Georgiev wrote:
they provide the IT department with cheerleaders in return
In that case, I would like to join that IT team :)
Manas Bhardwaj Please remember to rate helpful or unhelpful answers, it lets us and people reading the forums know if our answers are any good.
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Good points. I don't think the marketing team could possibly understand the dev lifecycle.
"I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours. " — Hunter S. Thompson My comedy.
wizardzz wrote:
I don't think the marketing team could possibly understand the dev lifecycle.
True, all they need are content writers and content designers. for everything else they should get nice CMS and CRM systems.
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Tell them they can have their programmers if they provide the IT department with cheerleaders in return.
There is only one Vera Farmiga and Salma Hayek is her prophet! Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
In most places I've worked, programmers are kept well-insulated from marketing/sales nazis.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997 -
In most places I've worked, programmers are kept well-insulated from marketing/sales nazis.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997That's the way it is here. It is mostly to protect the salesmen. The engineers want to kill them every time they sell another machine with a custom option that we have never done or even considered doing.
Brad Deja Moo - When you feel like you've heard the same bull before.
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In most places I've worked, programmers are kept well-insulated from marketing/sales nazis.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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"Why don't you tie a kerosene-soaked rag around your ankles so the ants won't climb up and eat your candy ass." - Dale Earnhardt, 1997It's probably a good idea. The last time a salesperson sold the source code for one of my products (it's happened twice) they had to put me into restraints to keep me from killing the stupid twit.
Software Zen:
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
I work for a large company (thousands of employees) and there are various teams of developers. I work in the marketing department and I am a web developer. I have a couple web developers coworkers who are also in the marketing department, as well as some web designers and a bunch of other people (e.g., people who write "copy" and manage website content). The way I understand it, we (the marketing department) get say on the user experience (mostly when it is something that is customer facing). IT controls upgrades and they have written major portions of the shared code base we use. I have seen some conflicts where managers don't know who owns what, but they always find some way to resolve it. The developers in marketing are allowed to deploy DLL's and such to the website, but we are not given access to the server. Instead, we use a deploy tool that copies files to production. That works nicely, because we copy files frequently and we let IT figure out all the configuration stuff (e.g., they handle DNS changes and such when a new domain needs to be created). As far as the CMS, a guy in IT had some experience with Umbraco and he suggested we use it, so we did (I'm now "the Umbraco guy", as I did a large amount of research and testing when implementing the website in Umbraco). There were no conflicts because none of us had any experience with another CMS and there was really no budget for an expensive (read: not free) CMS. So, basically, the developers in marketing work closely with the developers in IT, but if push comes to shove, the marketing department gets say for only what affects the company's image.
Martin Fowler wrote:
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
Maybe this line of logic could help you in your advocacy against the marketing department's plan. The idea is absurd and is much like a person who merely drives a highway to work everyday demanding--unknowingly--that they serve as the construction foreman for a road project on the same road. That person's fallacy is that they believe that customer requirements given directly to the working hands of the immediate product should yield the best results. The stupidity of this mindset comes from the fact that the marketing department employees don't know jack s about engineering. Will their solution result in redundant databases? That, specifically, may lead to many more serious issues that can have a huge negative business impact--can you say 'synchronization issues gallore'? Do they even know how to do project planning? There are a myriad of reasons why IT departments exist. And, every one of those reasons is a reason why the marketing department should not own programmers.
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
In my experience with large companies, IT will often have a sub-department or crew who works with marketing but who are still within the IT department; it is IT, not Marketing, that hires them, issues performance reviews, etc. This is A. because marketing people are too ignorant to make informed decisions about who to hire and qualifications are necessary, and B. because web programmers often need access to and training on hardware and software that IT knows better than to let Marketing get within 20 feet of.
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
They are trying to bullshit you. Keep saying you are still evaluating competitors until they start sending scantily clad women smiling invitingly to transmit the message.
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| FoldWithUs! | sighist | WhoIncludes - Analyzing C++ include file hierarchy -
Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
In large corporations IT can mean software support and IT infrastructure support(DBAs, Network support etc). So an area like Web development can easily come under the marketing department - using myself as an example I work for one of these large businesses and even though I program and do development work I work in the Operations section and not the IT section.
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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I work for a large company (thousands of employees) and there are various teams of developers. I work in the marketing department and I am a web developer. I have a couple web developers coworkers who are also in the marketing department, as well as some web designers and a bunch of other people (e.g., people who write "copy" and manage website content). The way I understand it, we (the marketing department) get say on the user experience (mostly when it is something that is customer facing). IT controls upgrades and they have written major portions of the shared code base we use. I have seen some conflicts where managers don't know who owns what, but they always find some way to resolve it. The developers in marketing are allowed to deploy DLL's and such to the website, but we are not given access to the server. Instead, we use a deploy tool that copies files to production. That works nicely, because we copy files frequently and we let IT figure out all the configuration stuff (e.g., they handle DNS changes and such when a new domain needs to be created). As far as the CMS, a guy in IT had some experience with Umbraco and he suggested we use it, so we did (I'm now "the Umbraco guy", as I did a large amount of research and testing when implementing the website in Umbraco). There were no conflicts because none of us had any experience with another CMS and there was really no budget for an expensive (read: not free) CMS. So, basically, the developers in marketing work closely with the developers in IT, but if push comes to shove, the marketing department gets say for only what affects the company's image.
Martin Fowler wrote:
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
That pretty much matches the model in the company I work for where I work in Operations/Production developing and running the production systems for our clients.
Continuous effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential.(Winston Churchill)
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Our marketing department wants to hire their own programmers. They say that most other companies are structured this way, where the web programmers work directly for marketing rather than IT. Is that true in your organization? How are the roles structured for creating and maintaining your organization's web site? How much input does your marketing department have in determing the technology used, including the CMS?
I think the marketing guy is sitting in the middle.[^]
CQ de W5ALT
Walt Fair, Jr., P. E. Comport Computing Specializing in Technical Engineering Software
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I work for a large company (thousands of employees) and there are various teams of developers. I work in the marketing department and I am a web developer. I have a couple web developers coworkers who are also in the marketing department, as well as some web designers and a bunch of other people (e.g., people who write "copy" and manage website content). The way I understand it, we (the marketing department) get say on the user experience (mostly when it is something that is customer facing). IT controls upgrades and they have written major portions of the shared code base we use. I have seen some conflicts where managers don't know who owns what, but they always find some way to resolve it. The developers in marketing are allowed to deploy DLL's and such to the website, but we are not given access to the server. Instead, we use a deploy tool that copies files to production. That works nicely, because we copy files frequently and we let IT figure out all the configuration stuff (e.g., they handle DNS changes and such when a new domain needs to be created). As far as the CMS, a guy in IT had some experience with Umbraco and he suggested we use it, so we did (I'm now "the Umbraco guy", as I did a large amount of research and testing when implementing the website in Umbraco). There were no conflicts because none of us had any experience with another CMS and there was really no budget for an expensive (read: not free) CMS. So, basically, the developers in marketing work closely with the developers in IT, but if push comes to shove, the marketing department gets say for only what affects the company's image.
Martin Fowler wrote:
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand.
Thank you. That is a helpful example of where it works. I am trying really hard (with degrees of success that vary throughout the weeks) to be open minded about this. Who writes code that reads and writes data to the production databases used by the other non-IT/Marketing departments, or does that apply to your case? If for some reason someone in your department or IT decided Umbraco wasn't allowing you to expand into new areas, such as mobile devices or similar, who would decide the next platform? Would there be resistance to choosing a platform that didn't leverage your company's existing expertise in .NET and/or your current code base and DLLs to go with one of the "newest tools and technologies available" such as Groovy/Grails? By the way, thanks for mentioning Umbraco. It looks interesting, and a similar concept to Sitefinity which we are using for our intranet.
