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Who should drive technology decisions?

October 14th, 2005 by Dan Leeds

In the Web world, there’s always (in my experience, anyway) been something of a gulf between IT and marketing/business side. It’s not just that we speak different languages - we do - but we actually tend to view the world through completely different lenses.

IT often sees its role as deciding what technology (this may include Web application servers, content management systems, or other customer-facing functionalities) to use, leaving the “experience layer” to the Web or marketing team or whoever else may lay claim to owning the experience. Placing on my IT glasses, this perspective makes perfect sense.;’We have the knowledge and skills to best evaluate these tools, so we’ll make the call on what’s best. Then the ball’s in your court and you can wrap whatever design you want around it.”

Glasses off: The problem with the ‘technology-first’ view is that there’s a very real inter-dependency between core technology and the experience. It’s entirely possible that technology decisions made in advance of Web strategy or requirements will create some major conflict somewhere down the development path. We’ll come with our by then established design and requirements, to hear that universal refusal, “That’s an expansion of scope,” to get around some limitation of the system. Or maybe we’ll wind up with a content management system from one company because their software fits into some “tech stack” vision while it overlooks critical business user flow needs.

When I talk to my Web agency pals, this is one of their biggest beefs. They work with a lot of companies, and the projects driven by IT usually fall to this pattern. Not surprisingly, these projects often come out less well than business-driven ones.

The way it *should* work is to have technology decisions preceded by a full strategy. This strategy can’t just speak to user experience - it has to be some kind of synthesis between the experience and how it will be enabled. Get IT to the table as a partner in this phase to create a sort of ebb and flow dialog about how the experience should steer the technology…and vice versa. The product of this exercise is an actionable plan for development.

As my business-friendly IT partner always says when he’s trying to get through to his colleagues, “form follows function,” meaning that the use for a technology comes before its solution. I agree with him, with the condition that function allow itself to be influenced by form. Each of our perspectives has a lot of value for the other - can’t we all just get along?