If you’re responsible for your company’s website or other digital marketing initiatives, you likely find yourself in one of the following situations: either your IT group is wholly responsible for maintaining your website / digital initiatives, you’re responsible for the technical and execution aspects yourself with no IT assistance, or some combination of the first two scenarios.
Regardless of the level of internal IT support for your digital initiatives, you can still leverage an interactive agency for your interactive advertising needs. Interactive agencies have the ability to operate in many different technology partnership models, providing flexibility to ensure you’re successful in bringing those creative ideas to life.
A full service technology partnership model may include hosting arrangements, full stack website development, consultation with your internal IT to verify standards / knowledge transfer, quality assurance (QA), and ongoing maintenance services. This type of arrangement works well for an organization that doesn’t have dedicated internal IT resources to develop and/or support external company web applications.
While a full service technology partnership model reduces complexity in cross-team coordination and communication, it is not always in line with a client’s organizational needs. A common alternative model that works for many organizations is to split the responsibilities for development between the agency’s technology team and the internal IT department. In this arrangement, the agency may develop the front end components of the site while the internal IT department focuses their effort on the back end components, such as database design, underlying web and data services, and/or content management system implementation. If the internal IT department is responsible for developing and maintaining the full code stack, then the agency can work in a consulting role to provide technical direction and best practice support for content management and other facets of the implementation.
Beyond defining roles and responsibilities, a partnership model allows for more efficient development cycles by defining methodologies and tools that create efficient synergy amongst developer groups, agency creative groups, and stakeholders. For example, software tools that provide client facing defect and task management allow all parties to work from the same tracking information during and after the development cycle, dramatically increasing the quality of the final product.
The bottom line – a full service interactive agency can be your interactive technology partner, regardless of the level of internal IT involvement in delivering your web initiatives.
Check back for more thoughts on interactive technology and how it can be used to enable rich web experiences that ultimately build and enhance relationships with your consumer.
Contributor: Stan Carrico, Technology Manager
