“Wagging the Dog!”: A damning indictment of the Internal IT Department
Bloated IT departments slow decisions, limit capability, and turn execution into negotiation.
Marketing & Comms plan a campaign to hit a live commercial opportunity… the brief is clear, the budget exists, the timeline makes sense… then the Internal IT Department step in and everything grinds to a halt.
We see this pattern across companies with bloated internal IT teams; IT no longer supports the business - they control it. They decide which platforms you can use, how you can use them, and when things can go live. They hold the keys to delivery, and they use that position to expand their reach into areas they unfortunately do not understand.
Marketing pays the price
A typical move by your newly empowered IT Department is the inevitable implementation of the absurdly priced and over-featured Microsoft 365 and its various and varied business tools.
Cue tumbleweed-filled comms channels and project road-blocks.
The forced adoption of these tools serves only to justify bloated IT budgets and give the department something to turn on-and-off again.
A simple request - a new feature… even a small layout change. IT turns it into a ticket, a review cycle, a security audit, and a slot in a release schedule that sits weeks away. Marketing ask to use a proven marketing platform. Aside from forcing project comms tools that simply don’t work for human beings, IT blocks the proposed platform because it sits outside their preferred stack. Marketing need speed, IT gives them process.
Control replaces progress
This control comes with a cost that few businesses properly track until it’s too late. The IT Team grows to support the systems they insist on owning and that cost comes out of the same pot that should be funding marketing & comms activity. The Marketing Department loses budget that should drive growth and revenue and replace it with internal overhead that slows it down.
At the same time, expectations do not change. Marketing still carries the targets, needing leads, pipeline, and growth. They just have fewer tools, less budget, and a delivery process that fights them at every step.
Then the blame lands in the wrong place
Campaigns underperform, launches slip and features get cut... marketing gets questioned. Yet the root cause sits upstream; IT made the decisions, set the constraints, and controlled the timeline.
This really is not a fringe issue; we’ve seen it build over 28 years of working with ambitious & growing organisations. The more influence IT gains, the more it tries to standardise and control. That approach works for infrastructure but fails miserably for marketing.
Marketing does not run on the same clock as IT
The Marketing and Comms Team works to market opportunities, competitor activity, and customer behaviour. They test, iterate, and adapt in real time and need tools that fit the job, not tools that fit an internal policy. They need autonomy to act, not permission to proceed.
When IT takes ownership of marketing platforms and delivery, it removes that autonomy and replaces commercial judgement with technical preference. IT slows decisions, limits capability, and turns execution into negotiation.
Some IT teams will argue that they protect the business - pointing to security, compliance, and risk, and not without good reason; those concerns matter. But they do not justify blocking revenue-generating activity or forcing Marketing into systems that limit performance.
A business does not grow because its internal systems feel tidy - it grows because it reaches customers, converts demand, and moves faster than competitors.
The companies that get this right draw a hard line: IT secures and enables, Marketing owns marketing. Decisions about tools, platforms, and execution sit with the team accountable for their results.
Anything else creates friction, wasted budget, and missed opportunity
If your marketing team cannot launch quickly, cannot choose the right tools, or cannot spend its own budget without IT approval, you do not have alignment - you have a bottleneck.
