IT vs Digital

09 February 2013

What’s the difference between corporate IT and digital - and what should their roles be in producing and supporting the organisation’s digital products and services?

If the difference is just the name, then there obviously is no difference. But IT teams and digital teams also typically have staff with different skills, are positioned differently within an organisation and are set different objectives by senior management.

At its heart, IT is about developing and maintaining technology that supports the business. Good enterprise IT naturally seeks stable and predictable outcomes - which may be the reason it often appears slow, risk-averse and resistant to change. Its key tenets are efficiency, cost-control and reliability.

Digital teams have to innovate more quickly, because they are operating in such a fast-moving and competitive environment. Whether they are producing and supporting online products or using digital marketing to promote offline products, it’s usually better to embrace risk and change than stability and control.

However I wonder whether this approach might only work while ‘digital’ is in a relatively immature state in an organisation: a novelty which is given free rein. Is digital’s love of risk and change sustainable when teams and responsibilities grow - and success online becomes crucial for the organisation?

The answer partly depends on the organisational model adopted. If the digital team remains centralised then it may be able to maintain its own working style and culture. But in most organisations it’s going to make more sense for responsibilities for designing and producing digital outputs to be at least partly decentralized - so that staff are embedded in the departments which receive the value from their work.

If digital becomes decentralized, how can coherence be maintained across all digital products? How does an organisation ensure that its user experiences work well together - and that its output adds up to more than the sum of its parts?

I think organisations will do that in the same way as they do it in other realms (such as human resources, finance and branding): by setting and enforcing standards. It’s inevitable that the job of central digital teams will increasingly be to decide strategies, policies and procedures for online content, design and technology - and to conduct training, auditing and enforcement to maintain standards.

Which brings us back to the difference between IT and digital. Is the difference in style purely a result of the relative maturity of one over another?

I’m not sure, but I do think that the challenge for digital managers is clear: use standards to evolve to a more mature model which supports digital activities across the organisation, while staying innovative and competitive.