Been there Done That!
About 10 years ago the CEO decided that the website (Part of IT) was outdated and needed a face lift. So he turned content over to marketing, with IT providing the technical expertise. That went on for several years with IT (both sides) trying to satisfy the "ARTISTS" in the marketing department.
After several language upgrades, they decided that the "NEW" technology needed to be outsourced so we could take advantage of all the new things the web can do. A large budget increase and no new technology and we have a different website, but not noticably better, but with a yearly maintenance budget.
Since then, we have gained a CIO and split the Software Development and Operations functions into two departments. We are still waiting on the "NEW" technology in the website.
So having said all that. Outsourcing is one method of doing website development. It does not require the experience or the level of knowledge that application development does, but it is close. A really good website is dynamic, and that requires database integration, and that is programming in anyones book. At that point, it stops being script kiddies and is development.
The only operations functions are hosting, which is offsite for us now, and routing, which is a one off addition to the routing tables. So operations really doesn't come into it.
If I had to do it all over again, I think we would have outsourced much sooner. You can't please artists, no matter how good you are, since like developers (IR1), they never met another in their field whose work they like. Once you put a budget between the artists and the developers, it tones down the retoric to a business decision and it becomes less about style and more about return on investment and customer satisfaction. Where style matters, it is budgeted and paid for. Where it doesn't, it goes by the board.
I would say that getting a CIO was the best improvement we have made to both sides of IT. It lets techs do techy things, and management concentrate on strategic business decisions. The interface between the two is the CIO, and all the late night worry sessions are in his ballpark now. Much less stress on the rest of us.
Having been on all sides of this issue, I can tell you that there is a trade off. When I developed web pages for the public, I was very protective of the database and would kill projects that opened us up to privacy issues. I was not as concerned with server stability, because we had people to backstop me on that. Which means that yes, I did occasionally screw the pooch and leave a hole in network security. But having good admins generally catch those things. Once we outsourced the web development, we lost all of the exposure to the public web, and that was a big plus, both on the network security and database integrety side. Hope this has helped.
