Architecture and web companies

I have been doing consulting work for a couple of companies whose products are entirely informational. Essentially companies that provide information services over the web. I have been struck at both of them about the mixing of the technology that delivers the "product" (often really a service, but it helps my head to think in terms of a product!) and the technology that runs the business.

An example from the genuine product world will help illustrate what I am thinking about. When making and selling hamburgers, there is a clear separation of what is delivered and how it is accounted for, tracked - essentially how the back office runs. The selling of hamburgers is a sufficiently different proposition than the creation of the back office business systems. I wouldn't attempt to combine the 2. Yes it is important that the sales information flows... (see earlier post on flow of goods, flow of money, flow of information). However, I don't have my fryer installation crew and my cooks building the systems.

Where the product is informational, companies often think that the product and the back office rely on IT, so they must be the same. So we have the people who think in terms of product, features, etc. responsible for the potentially more mundane chores of installing and managing the back end systems - giving the internal business the data it needs to run and manage the business, and the sales/support and other staff the tools they need to do the job.

In reality these are entirely different groups - and should be. Yes they might share common technology needs/data/platforms (although there is little guarantee even of that). Yes they may share communications infrastructure and communication methods/platforms. But in reality the activities required to deliver a world class product and the activities to provide robust "run/manage the business" systems are as different as flipping burgers and accounting for the flipped burgers. Mixing the teams (and thus not getting a proper separation of "IT" responsibilities) leads to some very brittle systems - often because the value of the "run/manage the business" applications is almost always subjugated to the "develop and operate the product" systems.