Building Your I-Team

Perrill says that First Scribe prefers one key contact to serve as their liaison with the company. “You can occasionally get too many cooks in the kitchen; the more people who are involved, the harder it is to get things done,” he says.

Making Peace

In an ideal world, the marketing department, the IT team, and all the other stakeholders in a Web site would live in relative harmony. The different factions would understand and appreciate each other’s value to the project and cooperate for the betterment of the business as a whole. But, especially when marketing and IT cross paths, that’s sometimes not the case.

“Unfortunately, the two are usually at odds,” says Jeremy Ziegler, chairman of Aware Web Solutions, Inc., a Web development, content management, and search-engine marketing company in Edina. “There’s never really any harmony,” he says of the thorny relationship between marketing and IT.

Often, conflict arises because marketing wants to change or update content in a manner that taxes the IT staff, which may already be spread thin on other projects. Although the changes may very well be good or necessary, the fact that they pull IT professionals away from their other tasks can cause problems.

“Friction begins when IT perceives that marketing is wasting its time,” Prendergast says. “The good news is that we have software solutions that allow a non-technical person to make changes to the Web site—so marketing could do what it needs to do without getting IT involved. Marketing loves it because it allows them to make their content changes, and IT loves it because it frees up more of their time.”

The key to cooperation, Halvorson says, is to identify a project manager who sees both sides of the story. “You need a great project manager who speaks both languages to mediate,” she says. “You need someone who can take the time to listen to both sides and to understand their needs and then say, ‘Yes, I understand why IT needs two weeks of lead time for this,’ or ‘Yes, marketing, I understand why we need to create this.’”