Process Automation: for IT or each department to implement?

Question

As an IT web developer I write mostly process automation code and reporting for all departments in the company (IT, Legal, HR, Engineering, Tech Writers, Finance & Accounting, Marketing, etc).

However, some other departments also have small programming teams (Engineering, HR and Marketing) which do some department specific work which is part of their "core job".

For instance marketing maintains our external website and therefore needs some graphic artists and HTML/CSS/JS developers to implement it. HR has a dedicated staff that only works with our salary/payment system as it's highly confidential. Engineers automate some debugging/testing with scripts that require advanced engineering knowledge to make.

How can you draw the line between which projects these small, expert, non-IT teams should handle and which IT should handle? Are there best practices or a list of criteria that could be used?

This issue is both political and technical, but I'm looking for best practices and the ideal way to draw the line, not political considerations.

Answer 1

You should draw the line based on the org chart and expected responsibilities, the more you can reference existing org documents the better. Examples, Marketing is doing front end work for the company website, but IT should be in charge on an internal intranet site.

Your org docs should already have IT in charge of internal information systems, perhaps HR is the exception with the need for privacy. That exception would provide the boundary for you, anything not contained in the exception is the roll of IT and not HR. They work on their code base and hold the keys to their database. But if the systems the code and database run on need tweaking that should be IT and should be in line with company wide standards.

Using this example something like optimizing part of the network for the Engineering team would be easy to answer. That is an IT job. Optimizing a test case would fall to Engineering. Code for backing up and encrypting Financial data is IT's responsibility, you don't need to know what the information is really, just it's basic properties. Writing code to analyze Financial documents would go to someone within Finance, because access to sensitive documents would be needed, etc.