The DXP Catalyst Update - Aug 12, 2025

INTRO
Welcome to This Week’s DXP Catalyst Update

Clear ownership between IT and marketing is becoming a critical success factor in the era of composable architecture. As organizations assemble digital ecosystems from best-in-class tools, the lines between technical and marketing responsibilities blur. Campaign orchestration depends on sound integrations. Personalization requires both customer insight and technical delivery. Analytics needs consistent data pipelines alongside meaningful interpretation. Without clearly defined boundaries, these overlaps can turn into bottlenecks, confusion, and strained collaboration.

The most effective organizations treat ownership as a deliberate, evolving framework rather than an informal understanding. They identify where responsibilities should sit, how decisions get made, and when collaboration is required. This week’s DXP Catalyst Update explores how to create those boundaries, maintain them over time, and avoid the cultural and operational pitfalls that undermine even well-structured models.

LEADERSHIP GUIDANCE

Defining Ownership Between IT and Marketing in a Composable Stack

Composable architecture has changed how digital teams build and operate experiences. Instead of committing to a single large platform, organizations now assemble ecosystems from multiple best-in-class services such as content, personalization, search, commerce, and analytics. The benefit is greater agility, the ability to swap tools as needs change, and faster innovation across the organization.

The challenge lies in managing growing complexity. A composable stack blends marketing-led capabilities such as personalization strategy and campaign activation with IT-led responsibilities such as integration, data architecture, and security. Many of these areas overlap significantly across both teams. Without clear ownership, responsibilities quickly become blurred, which slows delivery and creates friction between teams that should be working in close alignment.

Recognizing Shared Responsibility

In a composable stack, some functions are naturally shared. Personalization depends on marketing’s understanding of customer behavior but also requires IT’s work to deliver the right experience at scale. Analytics works in a similar way, with marketing interpreting trends while IT ensures the underlying data is reliable and securely accessible.

However, shared responsibility is not the same as shared chaos. Many organizations assume collaboration will naturally emerge without boundaries, but this rarely happens. Instead, collaboration tends to appear under pressure when an urgent issue forces the teams together. Establishing clear expectations for shared areas ensures both sides know when to involve each other, preventing unnecessary delays or misalignment.

Creating a Clear Framework

Clear ownership requires more than dividing responsibilities into IT or marketing buckets. Each capability benefits from having a primary owner and a secondary owner. The primary owner drives decision-making, sets standards, and manages execution. The secondary owner ensures their team’s priorities are represented and participates in regular reviews.

For instance, IT might lead on backend architecture, integrations, and security, while marketing leads on content workflows, personalization logic, and campaign orchestration. Some areas, such as data governance or vendor selection, work best when both teams actively contribute. This dual-ownership approach creates accountability while keeping collaboration alive.

The most successful frameworks are documented and visible. A simple matrix showing responsibilities for each capability reduces ambiguity and helps new team members understand where they fit. It also provides a quick reference when questions arise about who owns a decision.

Supporting the Framework with Governance

A well-defined framework is only as strong as the effort put into its upkeep. As new tools are introduced, team members shift roles, or organizational priorities change, ownership boundaries can erode over time. Without consistent maintenance, the clarity established today can fade away within a matter of months.

Governance provides the structure needed to maintain stability over the long term. Regular roadmap reviews, active cross-functional committees, and living process documents keep the model current and relevant. Detailed playbooks that describe how handoffs occur, who approves specific changes, and how conflicts are resolved make the framework actionable rather than purely theoretical.

Governance should avoid becoming an unnecessary layer of bureaucracy that slows down decision-making. It should exist to keep collaboration predictable, minimize the number of escalations, and ensure that technology decisions remain aligned with broader business objectives. When executed effectively, it strengthens trust between IT and marketing while encouraging more productive partnerships.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Even clear frameworks can fail when the culture does not actively support them. Shadow IT continues to present a frequent challenge, with marketing teams adopting tools independently in order to bypass perceived IT bottlenecks. This approach frequently creates integration problems and data silos that slow the progress of future initiatives.

Over-centralization represents another significant trap for organizations seeking balance between IT and marketing. When IT maintains control over too many marketing-facing tools, it can unintentionally limit agility and responsiveness. The outcome is slower campaign execution and frustration among marketing teams who feel excluded from important decisions affecting their work.

Skills and capabilities matter just as much as structure when defining ownership. Assigning responsibility to a team without the necessary expertise or available resources creates a high risk of poor adoption. Ongoing training and enablement should form part of the ownership discussion, ensuring each team possesses the ability to meet its responsibilities effectively.

Knowing If It’s Working

You will recognize that ownership is functioning effectively when projects advance more quickly from concept to launch without repeated clarifications or unnecessary escalations. Clear responsibilities allow teams to make decisions quickly without second-guessing whether they are encroaching on another team’s territory.

Data quality also serves as a reliable measure of the framework’s success. When shared tools consistently contain accurate and well-maintained information, the model is likely supporting both IT and marketing effectively. In contrast, recurring errors or mismatched data between systems often signal that ownership gaps are creating avoidable problems.

Regular leadership check-ins help maintain progress and alignment over time. These sessions should evaluate whether responsibilities remain well-defined, whether collaboration between teams remains healthy, and whether structural adjustments are necessary as the technology stack continues to evolve.

Final Thoughts

Start by mapping the organization’s current composable stack in detail. For each capability, identify the lead role, the support role, and any gaps in responsibility or expertise. This exercise frequently uncovers overlapping efforts or entirely unassigned areas, providing a clear foundation for targeted improvement.

Once roles are clearly mapped, formalize them and share the framework with both IT and marketing teams. Even a lightweight model brings greater clarity than relying on assumptions that inevitably lead to inefficiency. As the stack evolves, make ownership reviews a recurring part of planning cycles to ensure the framework remains accurate and relevant.

The goal is sustained progress rather than immediate perfection. A clear and adaptable ownership framework will keep IT and marketing aligned, enabling the composable stack to fulfill its potential for flexibility, efficiency, and innovation.