Would you buy a website from your CIO?

A Wall Street Journal story this morning about a McKinsey & Co. survey highlights a situation that is too visible, too often, to marketers and business leaders everywhere. As the enterprise as a whole and marketing in particular become more digital with increasing reliance on IT, the less IT helps the enterprise get to where it needs to go.

CIOs main charge is to help align organizations towards a unified strategy, driving IT to be in line with overall needs, plans and market conditions. This is much easier said than done. Keeping operational, mission-critical business systems going on an increasing number of platforms while staying vigilant in anticipation of an eventual attack is tall a task even for the ablest of CIOs. Layering that with the need to act in an agile fashion to support marketing and business decisions and you risk an attention shortage if not latent resentment.

Web platforms are a often the epicenter for such friction. Websites today are complex beings with content management systems, measurement, tagging, analytics, social plugins and so much more. The need to maintain web platforms to support business needs imposes significant cost and time demands, often rare commodities in IT organizations. So marketers are going their way and vendors are increasingly offering solutions that skirt IT entirely.

SaaS Cloud tools spearhead this trend. Want to collaborate with your agencies on new content and social initiatives? Use a content marketing platforms (such as Skyword, Kapost and Oracle's Compendium) to replace your CMS, SharePoint and project planning package. Doing direct mail or PPC? Just partner with a landing page specialist to manage the incoming traffic. Mobile app? build one entirely disconnected from your real infrastructure and establish a separate infrastructure in the cloud. Hubspot and Marketo give marketing and sales teams answers through the toolsets they need with minimal to no involvement from people whose job it should be to provide them.

While not every company has Facebook's development brawn to build custom business applications, what should a company do? One solution is to take a deep breath and move non-operational areas of the website under the purview of the marketing and sales organizations. IT will maintain the responsibilities to oversee security, hosting and platforms; marketing will assume full stack control over customer-facing systems, not just messaging.

Naturally, this is far from easy. Marketing will need to take over software development and a team that can work in the speed of business. Platforms will also need to shift from what is normally an enterprise stack (Java/Microsoft heavy) into a newer and nimbler paradigm (APIs communicating directly with lightweight middleware and browser-based frameworks). Marketers will also need to learn to deal with living by code and rely on marketing technologists to lead and communicate effectively with their technology teams.

In my experience this direction can work as long as companies are willing to accept the risk and experience growing pains. CIOs can then take a back seat to focus on big difficult things they should while marketers can finally do what they want, at a pace they now own. This takes time, but the potential for harmony and collaboration is there and can be yours for the taking.