Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… Here is a problem we’ve been preaching about for years, and along comes Tom Jacobs’ post with the above title, reminding us that although there has been improvement, we still encounter companies – principally tech companies – that leave their IT people (or even worse for them, their developers, who clearly have more critical things to do) essentially in charge of their website redevelopment projects.
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, even for technology companies, the website is first and foremost… a marketing, sales and customer service vehicle …which means that marketing has to make all the key calls about design choices, information architecture, branding/messaging and content. There’s no rational basis for believing that IT folks can do that properly, any more than there is for believing that a marcomm person will be able to bring up a hundred-seat LAN, all with identical office-productivity software, over a weekend.
That doesn’t mean in any way to cut IT out of the picture. As Tom says: “IT has a role to play certainly and should contribute their tech savvy to ensure the website has the GUI, the ease of navigation, the proper hosting platform and CMS systems and ensure the rich apps can all run smoothly.” And their role should expand in cases where the website is deeply integrated with the company’s internal systems, or where the company plans to do ongoing development with internal programmers. But at the end of the day, the site’s visitors (aka buyers) will be looking for content that represents solutions to their business problems, and that must always rest with the marketing department.
It doesn’t need to be a battle; it does need to be a partnership. As Tom puts it: “I would encourage the management team to allow marketing leadership to make marketing decisions and IT leadership to make IT decisions.”
