I think I’m lucky in that I get along pretty well with and work very frequently with the IT Dept here. Although we tend to work well together regardless of the org chart, I think it would be best if the web sites fell under their own department. Namely Ebusiness or Ecommerce comprised of it’s own marketing and IT folk with an Ebusiness Director reporting directly to the CEO and working closely with the CIO and VP of Planning & Development (where marketing is held at my organization). It seems as though other organizations with this sort of set up have been successful.

And needless to say, it’d be great to have a crew working with me… or at least one other person.

I agree with both of you that Marketing and IT need each other. I think this is even more true today than it was 10 years ago. I used to feel, coming from the design side, that I could build a website on my own if I had to. Now with AJAX and other so-called “Web 2.0″ technologies, and heightened levels of consumer expectations in terms of services you can deliver over the web, we’ve moved past basic HTML and CSS. That said, I love Neal’s analogy of what a brochure would look look like if the print shop was responsible for it.

In terms of governance, I hear what you’re saying about the web shop living outside of marketing and IT, but I also wonder how that works when you consider the web to be one aspect of an integrated marketing communications platform? Going back to the brochure, the presence of some technical requirements for final delivery (in this case running a printing press) doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to place responsibility for developing the brochure outside of either group involved.

I find another difficulty in the gap between an “ideal world” solution to the issue of web governance (and org. charts), and what may already be in existence at an organization. Has anyone had experience initiating a major change in the way your organization approached the web?

I’m actually planning to make a pitch in next year or two for our web crew (hopefully than one by then) to ‘relocate’ to the Chief Quality Officer’s silo, with a dotted line to the CIO. In our organization, both HR and Communications sit under the CQO, and internally we’re beginning to pay a lot of attention to web-based efforts in all aspects of quality. (I just don’t know how the suggestion will be received by IT)

Jake

But with due apologies to the 1-man gangs out there, having IS or IT be responsible for your web site is like having the print shop be responsible for any brochure or your annual report. You certainly can’t get the job done without them, but imagine how differently the brochure would look if the print shop was responsible for the whole thing!

I used to work at an interactive agency doing business with Fortune 500 companies, and no two entities had their web governance set up the same way. And I hardly find an organization at our annual conference that is organized the way any other is set up.

There’s the rub: Finding the right mix and governance. Both need to be at the table, but who’s in charge? Who makes the final call? That’s where a lot of the difficulty comes in, based on my experience. Both sides think they have authority, and the result is a mess.

The only models I’ve seen where the problem gets solved is when the web team is neither communications/marketing nor IS. They are their own entity, frequently reporting to the CEO or COO.

For whatever it is worth, I’m in Communications, but I serve that translator role that Jake wrote about so eloquently. I take the needs of the marketing and comm folks and turn it into actionable and usable items on the web. Where the wheels come off is where we need IS involvement because they own a back-end database or something like that. Then we have all the problems Jake wrote about.

This has all the makings of a panel at next year’s conference!