Here in Dallas, lots of retailers have their corporate headquarters here. I've done some consulting work for one of them in the past and a couple years ago one of them was trying to recruit me pretty heavily for their big e-commerce push.
Most of these companies don't have that many full time employees in their IT departments. A handful of full time employees will oversee an army of contractors and consultants. Most of these folks are specialized in SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, etc and don't know the first thing about building scalable web-based e-commerce.
The sites that do exist tend to be old, monolithic .NET or Java apps with antiquated processes to deploy them. An old boss of mine that went to work for one of these retailers said he had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site.
had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site
That is a huge issue that developers see when they see an established company. Then you add in existing technical ego's from other teams and you just have a recipe for a stagnant crashing every month disaster. It's a generalization, but we all make them, it is how we make semi-informed decisions based on loose facts. Some large companies are wrongly maligned in the process but it's the reality.
When I took over the web at Marriott, we separated it from IT all together and made it a business division, in doing so we could make decisions independent of IT approval and we I had an independent budget under my discretion. Many companies just don't get how these slight organizational changes can make a huge difference in a teams ability to deliver technology.
The retailer that tried to recruit me was led by a former startup CTO that was doing much of what you described to try to change things. Aside from separating IT, the other big change was to create a new campus/location with a better dress code, no Web Sense, and a separate network domain.
This post reminds, I should check in with him and see how things are going.
Most of these companies don't have that many full time employees in their IT departments. A handful of full time employees will oversee an army of contractors and consultants. Most of these folks are specialized in SAP, Oracle, Business Objects, etc and don't know the first thing about building scalable web-based e-commerce.
The sites that do exist tend to be old, monolithic .NET or Java apps with antiquated processes to deploy them. An old boss of mine that went to work for one of these retailers said he had to get 5 physical signatures on a form to push out a CSS file to the site.