Should your organisation have a “web department”?
One of the web’s elder statesmen, and all round delightful person, Jeffrey Zeldman (he did a video keynote for our first ever conference, which you can watch here - it’s about 9 minutes, and a lot of fun) asks today “who should be responsible for an organisation’s web experience?” - Should it be IT? Should it be marketing? Should we be seeing whole new divisions within large organisations which focus specifically on the web experience?
As our profession matures, increasingly “the web” won’t simply be an adjunct to IT, marketing, and other divisions. What is your experience? Is this happening? What challenges does it represent?
Scott G
July 2nd, 2007 at 2:29 pm
The web team currently consists of those who are passionate about the web in general and that translates into different disciplines and not everyone is actually based in IT (just most)
I think that will change once the web (and standards) become more a bigger priority in certain organisations.
Gary Barber
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm
This is one of my passions. I firmly believe web teams shouldn’t be in IT or marketing. They need to be separate distinct to function and deliver the goods correctly.
Chris Velevitch
July 2nd, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Designing the user experience shouldn’t only apply to the website, it should apply to all aspects of the organisation’s interactions: products, communications (written, verbal and digital), processes (internal and external). It’s needs to be part of the organisation’s culture. It needs to be driven from the top.