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?
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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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.
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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.
Yes, and we've thought of a myriad reasons to push against it, all of which seem to have been ignored by our CEO, although it's hard to be sure at this point. My own analogy is that IT should then be put in charge of the design of all the company's brochures, or do all the hiring of the HR or Research staff. On the other hand, I am trying to keep an open mind. Maybe a hybrid system will work better. It seems to work for AspDotNetDev's and GuyThiebaut's companies. And it looks like it works because there is a clear consensus between the two departments of what everyone's roles are.
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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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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?
Guess I'll jump in the pool on this one, too. Apologies ahead of time for the tl/dr. I am a lead dev, and I have two devs reporting to me. I don't report into IT. I report to Client Services (think estimation/production folks), so I'm one of the so-called "Shadow IT" groups. Reading some of your questions and responses to others, I'll try to head a few off here. The reason teams like mine exist is because IT isn't handling the needs of these organizations. Now, that's not an indictment of IT. IT has to put resources against projects that get prioritized by something objective (like dollars), and quite honestly, these smaller groups will *never* have projects that get them listed in the top 10 of dollar savings, so they're stuck copying and pasting data from one excel file into twenty other excel files simply because the cost of having a low-wage CS employee do that 8 hours a day for 16 years is still less than the cost of having IT automate it. That's where I come in. My team takes these little piss-ant projects that take us about 2 weeks to complete, then we roll it out to happy users. Did we just save the company millions of dollars? No. In fact, we probably just cost the company a few bucks (unless you know how to convert morale into dollars). We don't set any direction in IT projects. We don't put anything out that clients see. We just alleviate the day-to-day pains of regular Joe employee. Every once in a while we do a "big" project that lasts a few months, and we have to read and/or write to a database that is under IT's control. So how do we handle that? Well, we're free to read anything we want - that decision was cleared years ago. Writing data we have to jump through all sorts of hoops, and we have to be extremely explicit about exactly which column in which table will we be writing data to. And even then, they'll cut a "real" (read: reports into IT) dev loose long enough to write a 30-line-of-code web service and have us go through that. And there's one last thing that is at the core of everything my team does: It may get replaced tomorrow without notice, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it, except move on to the next project.
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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.
TNCaver wrote:
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?
There are a bunch of databases and I have not seen them all. However, the one I use and the one used by the IT folks for a bunch of stuff is setup in a project as an EDMX (Entity Framework). There are some (no names, but those who still work in ASP on occassion) that like to use the connection string in the web.config to open their own connections and DataReaders and such, but I stick to LINQ against this EDMX. I have a login to dev and production and can create tables then add them to the EDMX as I need, without permission from anybody special.
TNCaver wrote:
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?
I would provide input and we'd probably all decide (IT, marketing, including managers). In the end, it would be up to the managers to duke it out.
TNCaver wrote:
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?
I'd certainly provide some resistance. And I'm sure most/all of my coworkers would as well. If somebody made a really good case for it though, I'm sure we'd all give in if it was the right thing to do. Of course, we'd have to include more than just how good that technology accomplished a particular goal when making a decision (e.g., the amount of work involved in learning that new technology).
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?
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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?
Sounds like a bad idea. Where I am now, apparently the company just went through a very extensive effort to get a bunch of disparate systems into some sort of common/standard configuration that is supportable. I suspect your company will soon start sliding down the slippery slope where each group "just has to" use different technologies than everyone else.
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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 one company, the Sales Department used one guy to write sales analysis programs for them using DB-III ona PC. Unfortunately, some conflicting requirements were given which he faithfully carried out (despite having an MS in Computer Science) and the Sales folks constantly complained that the numbers were wrong. It took one day of puzzling out the problem and then 1 hour to fix it!
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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've worked in organisations where they wanted to od that soret of thing - and organisations where they had done that sort of thing. It is invariably a waste of resources in the long run. The problem I have encountered is that marketing just want to get something done that they see as being both urgent and easy - someone knows someone who made a really good looking web page in a couple of hours, so they think that by employing someone they will get that work out the door so much faster than going via I.T. who, for some reason, want to plan it, scope it, and do it properly a genuine example was when marketing at one company bypassed I.t. and developed their own parts of a web site. The defelopers they contracted the job to simply hard-coded prices, product numbers etc. into the HTML, and the net result was an MS Access driven web site that only really used the databas eto capute customer orders online. Of course these then had to be printed out, and manually entered by an operator into the order entry system. Imagine what happened when there was no stock? or the dev had put in the stock number incorretly (cuz they just typed them in) The debacle goes on and on, and more and more I.T. get involved to try and sort out the mess. the whole thing happened becasue I (IT manager at the time) had estimated 3 months elapsed time to get the pages they required up and running. After six months their Access thing hadn't gone live. When it went live it lasted about 8 weeks before they had to bring it down due to multiple problems (prices, surprisingly, had changed, and the devs had left no way to change them other than editing html.) To avoid future debacles like this, here's what i did: I assigned one of my developers exclusively for marketing's use. he was available to them directly, to work on any projects they deemed fit. but he reported to me, and ran all the projects past me to ensure there was no duplaction of effort, integration into existing systems was planned, etc. We made sure the first couple of things marketing wanted got done quickly, but properly. And we funded it from the IT budget. which helped. It worked quite well - marketing still sked for the impossible overnight, but because they knew there was a resoucce working on it immediately, they were consoled somewhat.
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