Bob Lewis highlights an all too common problem in corporations: turf battles that involve IT:

I find myself in the midst of a turf war. The president of the company is battling the CIO over the issue of who should control the website. The president says it belongs in the Marketing department, the CIO says it belongs in IT.

Sometimes this is just a plain turf battle, and other times it's a sign of a much bigger problem: IT's real or perceived inability to execute. When business units start managing their own IT infrastructure, it's usually not because they have a real hankering for doing that; rather, it's because the IT department is seen as being incapable. That only leads to bigger internal turf battles - but the root probloem remains unsolved. Lewis gets to that issue here:

To the extent that the scope of the website encompasses areas beyond marketing, other areas also have content responsibilities - shareholder relations and recruiting being two of the most common. Another thought, that stems from the first, is that your president's thought process also worries me. He/she is making a common mistake - making a decision about organizational alignment based on the existence of a performance problem instead of fixing the problem. What I'm trying to say is that If IT isn't performing, keeping the website away from it still leaves the company with an IT organization that isn't performing.

Which points back to a general management failure. If business units won't utilize IT, that's a probably a sign that IT is broken. If management won't deal with that reality - and instead just tries to band-aid it by distributing responsibility (or allowing that distribution to take place) - then the root problem remains, and is a sucking chest wound for the entire organization. I suspect that this is a problem for an awful lot of companies.