I’ve worked with companies where the web department is managed under marketing and where it’s managed under IT. Where to place the web group seems to be a puzzling decision for most organizations. My experience has been neither marketing nor IT works well. There always seems to be tension between the two departments. “Marketing has these crazy ideas; they are unorganized and everything has to be done now”, says IT. While marketing laments, “We don’t get satisfactory service; they screw it up; it takes them forever and they always make a big deal of everything.”

Much of this conflict is because of the different business objectives of each department: marketing needs timeliness and agility; their initiatives have dependencies such as media buys, cross-promotions, changing public relations and executive mind changing; IT’s responsibility is to conduct due diligence, minimize risks, do things following a strict process and test thoroughly. On top of this, people’s personalities in these two disciplines are often very different – creative vs. analytic. This scenario is much like oil and water. In addition to this unlikely mix, in today’s economy most departments are under staffed, raising tensions even higher.

My solution is to make the web or interactive department its own entity, not under marketing or IT. Interactive projects range from marketing assignments to enterprise applications that serve business needs, just like marketing and IT themselves serve business needs. Web should interact with marketing and IT like other departments. They can be team members and/or stakeholders. It all depends on the situation. If the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Information Officer isn’t the boss, who is? A new C, the Chief Digital Officer is one answer.

I just want to see less dysfunction in large organizations. Interactive has been around 15 years (for all practical purposes) now and many companies still aren’t approaching it efficiently. Functional improvements would make my job a lot better and benefit the organizations greatly.