COMMENTS
Great post, Jenn. My question: should IT be involved in marketing software purchasing discussions beyond commenting on the ability for IT to optimize its implementation? In other words, would it be enough for me to say, "I want to do XYZ; how effectively can you make that happen with Acme's software?" and make a decision based in part on the answer to that question? Or is wiser to purchase software based in part on IT's valuation of the software? Or both?
Excellent. When I first posted to part 1, I thought it was just anti-IT. I'm happy to see part 2 is the counterpart (pro IT).
Actually, the scenario will go something like this. Marketing will probably fund the software purchase. Then IT will be involved in the installation, set-up, security, backup, etc. This is the way things should work.
If marketing doesn't want to pay for it - if they want to just use the IT budget, then IT should choose the software (unless they have existing software in place).
I'm a firm believer in using open source or free software, which has stood the test of time - if possible (i.e. Apache, MySQL, Perl, Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc.). Often you can purchase third party maintenence contracts, for a fraction of commercial software (i.e. Oracle or SQL Server). Of course, if the commercial software offers something that's unique - go that route.
Of course IT has to be involved with Marketing's Software Decisions. Marketing may know what the software needs to accomplish but only IT subject matter experts can understand how different software choices will affect ongoing operational expenses and therefore long-term ROI - not to mention security and performance concerns. The days of either department being able to deal with each other in isolation are behind us. Here's a blog post I wrote in regards to Inertia in IT but it could just as easily apply to Marketing.
http://www.thommitchell.com/2009/11/16/inertia-in-it-changing-hearts-and-minds/
Thanks for starting a good discussion on such an important topic.
Thanks,
Thom Mitchell
http://www.thommitchell.com
@Matt,
I think the answer to your question is "a little bit of both". So much of it depends on historic relationship of IT & marketing, how IT's systems are implemented, which department has bandwidth, etc.
I personally ALWAYS want marketing to make the final decision and involve IT only as much as necessary in order to make an optimal decision. But it's still nice to have a conversation to see if/how systems integrate/etc.
Thom is on the money. Particularly at larger organizations, the role of IT is not just to set up and maintain hardware/software systems. It is to make the organization run efficiently through those systems. Marketing will be the subject matter expert when it comes to functionality, and IT should be the subject matter when it comes to scalability, maintenance, interoperability, etc.
That said, I've experienced the bottleneck of IT before. But when all is working correctly, they should be involved in the process.
As several commentators have said, it's a balance. I agreee with Randy Kemp's assessment of the respective roles of IT and Marketing; essentially, each group contributing according their specific skills and experience. THere's no question that IT should be involved in IT decisions and should be involved in at least first-line ongoing support, but specialist consultants and vendors should be allowed to getting on with doing what they do every day. I wrote about this recently myself and hopefully struck this balance!
What IT needs to do for Marketing
As several commentators have said, it's a balance. I agreee with Randy Kemp's assessment of the respective roles of IT and Marketing; essentially, each group contributing according their specific skills and experience. THere's no question that IT should be involved in IT decisions and should be involved in at least first-line ongoing support, but specialist consultants and vendors should be allowed to getting on with doing what they do every day. I wrote about this recently myself and hopefully struck this balance!
What IT needs to do for Marketing
As several commentators have said, it's a balance. I agreee with Randy Kemp's assessment of the respective roles of IT and Marketing; essentially, each group contributing according their specific skills and experience. THere's no question that IT should be involved in IT decisions and should be involved in at least first-line ongoing support, but specialist consultants and vendors should be allowed to getting on with doing what they do every day. I wrote about this recently myself and hopefully struck this balance!
What IT needs to do for Marketing
It's interesting seeing a paired set of articles like this explore two sides of a common situation. This isn't just an IT and Marketing story, but also and IT and Sales, IT and Finance, IT and Operations...
In a nutshell, IT is responsible for providing tools to allow data input and collection, data storage, and data retrieval and reporting. There are many IT departments that choose the passive role of computer repair or simply don't want the responsibility. Funding a department that is shirking it's responsibilities seems like a poor decision to me. Maybe it's a communications issue, a strategic prioritization issue, a lack of resources, or simply someone that is holding down a role they don't understand. Find the root cause and fix the problem. The job of IT in a business is to fulfill that responsibility, bypassing them in the hopes to get something done more quickly is only going to make the problem worse.
Something interesting I noticed in the marketing perspective was the comment about level of experience and knowledge. This is something we all need to work on. Expertise in one area does not make you an expert at all. Being an expert at CMS's doesn't help you determine the impact on the network equipment, server licensing, existing budget negotiations, disaster recovery plans, local regulatory acts, and any of a dozen other topics. Having a subject matter expert in-house will lighten the load a little on IT, whose training and budgetary costs obviously weren't taken into account as part of the implementation planning, but it does not replace this responsibility.