I have seen too many small and even more medium sized organizations that do not have a centralized IT infrastructure and even worse have no written IT policy or operations manual. Consequently there is no coordination between departments and no continuity necessary to accommodate employee turnover. I have seen this lead to some truly undesirable consequences.

There was an organization I worked for that had an ISP that provided their Internet connection and assigned IP addresses. They had an IT department that is in charge of the internal network and manage the Exchange server for company email, file servers and provided support for users. They outsourced their web site hosting to another company. Each department managed their area of the web site via MS FrontPage to conserve cost. Each department that worked on the site would sort of 'assume'  they were responsible for the entire site which lead to a whole myriad of problems.

These are some of the consequences that were directly related to this lack of organization and centralization in just one company:

1. When the organization originally decided to have their first site developed, a committee was formed and several different contractors were interviewed and a choice was made as to who to go with. Specifications were provided for the site--one of the most important was that the organization have the ability to manage the various areas of the site internally to save on the ongoing cost of outsourcing.

After a few years, a new employee was hired into one of the departments that quasi managed the entire site. This individual had a friend with a web design company and decided to have this friend re-do the site. The result was a fantastic looking site that nobody but a professional web designer could update without causing the look of the pages to degrade. Consequently, rather than saving money by being able to make updates in-house, they had to now outsource this work.

Additionally, no one mentioned to any departments that an understanding of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and other advanced web programming was required to successfully make changes to the new site, and within very little time, the look of the site degraded badly and another developer had to be hired to repair the site and to make the ongoing updates.

2. DNS for the company domain was originally handled by the company that provided their Internet service. There was a staff change in the IT department and the new IT manager decided to manage the company's himself through yet another third party company. He signed up for the service and didn't tell anyone else in the company that he made the change or where the DNS was now being hosted or the account logon information to manage the service.

This employee left the company. The account went unpaid and their email and web site stopped working--visitors to the site got an error message stating the site was not working because of non-payment. It took several days to finally contact the DNS provider, pay the account and get the logon information to have the site up and working again.

3. A new employee came on staff and decided (correctly) to update the back-end of the site by developing an integrated database driven web application that would allow client/donor/employee logon, data mining, newsletter capability, and bring back the ability for the organization to again manage their own content. Several months into this project an employee in another department decided it was time to upgrade the site so hired another designer (again a non-bid contract) to do the work on the new site in a completely non-compatible programming language, literally wasting all of the time and dollars invested in developing the back-end of the site.

4. This company had several Domain names. Some registered by one person some by another--each group of names having different contact emails and different accounts for managing the domains. In some instances Passwords were changed but the IT person making the change (presumably so that the password could be one that was easier for him or her to remember) never recorded the changes and when it became necessary to make changes to the records nobody knew the correct logon information--yes, that employee left too.

5. The organization accepted credit cards, but because nobody could find any information about the credit card account after the person that set it up left the company, they decided it was just easier to outsource their on-line credit card processing to yet another company. This lead to a huge expense in fees over what they would have paid had they just incorporated this ability into their site directly.

6. As there were several promotions that go on during the year and the organization was a non-profit, they would also seek the help of independent web designers to design those portions of the site--so another cook 'helping' to stir the pot. The ramifications of this should now be obvious in light of the previously mentioned examples; more chaos and lose of design integrity and continuity through the site.

Additionally, none of the site-redesigns took into account any of the in-print promotions and consequently branding was not consistent from print to publicity to web site, not to mention from web site redesign to web site redesign.

There are several lessons that can be learned from this organization's mistakes. First take the time to develop a company wide IT policy and operations manual. Second, make sure the manual is updated regularly and all pertinent changes to anything under the scope of the IT department manual are thoroughly documented. Third, all decisions to make any major changes that have an effect on more than one department should only be made with the advice of all departments involved. Final decisions should then be evaluated by a person with enough knowledge and training to make a correct informed decision. If no such person exists within the organization a consultant should be hired to educate the decision makers. All major projects such as a re-design of the organization web site should be submitted for bid to a variety of qualified vendors. The advice of qualified vendors bidding on the project should be used as part of the educational process to aid decision makers in making an informed decision.

DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKES: Take the time to develop an IT policy and operations manual, and do it now! Almost all of the costly mistakes in this story could have been avoided had this policy been implemented.