Specialization happens as fields mature.  As disciplines grow into their own they spin off even more specialized sub-disciplines.  It’s a natural process of the development of human civilization.

However, it used to take a long time for this to happen.  Hundreds, even thousands of years would pass allowing fields like mathematics to slowly extract themselves from philosophy.  Careers lasted longer than lifespans: it was common for a single profession to descend from father to son, over the centuries.

Well, that’s over.

The “web business” is what, ten years old at best?  It’s changing under our feet.  Every year is different.  Sometimes it changes from month to month.  And it shouldn’t be any wonder to us that specialization is starting to work its way into the web business.  The idea of a generalized “web agency” that just does everything internally is starting to be replaced by a more flexible and sophisticated structure.

Here are some activities that used to fall entirely under the domain of “building and maintaining a website”.  Look how deep the rabbit hole goes on each one of these:

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): While a cursory knowledge of SEO can be easily gained by any web dev shop, the full blown thing is a black art which requires constantly staying current on the latest trends and practices by major search engines.
• Mobile: iPhone, Android, WAP…this specialization is deep, and it keeps getting deeper.  Just recently a mobile version of the website was a nice-to-have: now its mandatory.  And how about a native iPhone app that ties back to the main website while you’re at it?  You’ll need to know Objective-C, of course. Your Rails and PHP people won’t be able to do it.
• E-Commerce: Know how to integrate your site into comparison shopping sites?  Paypal?  Google checkout? Amazon Fulfillment Services?  Are you familiar with shopping cart best practices?  E-commerce is a world all of its own, with its own domain knowledge.

Is all of this stuff really the same business any more?  It seems to me that these specializations are getting complicated enough that they need actual specialists in order to do them.  The concept of a vanilla “web developer” is starting to become impossibly broad; sort of like calling yourself a “philosopher” on your resume.

Of course, the client still doesn’t want to deal with this.  They want to continue selling shoes or whatever and outsource all of this interactive marketing crap to someone else.  A single “someone else” is preferable: no one wants to try and co-ordinate 5 vendors who may step on each others toes.

That’s why I’m proposing a delegation tree.  The client outsources their interactive marketing business to a single “agency of record” who acts as custodian and project manager for the client’s online brand.  However that agency don’t try to do all of the work themselves.  Instead they selectively choose and outsource work to various specialist vendors, while ensuring that the overall integrity of the brand and customer experience is maintained.

There’s an obvious staffing advantage here.  The mothership agency doesn’t need to maintain deep expertise in the various rabbit-holes of the web anymore, and instead relies on the best-of-breed specialist agencies to focus on their respective areas.

Instead, the mothership agency is the custodian of the online presence of the client, in an exact analogy to the traditional ad agencies of the past.  They need to really understand (or even create) the interactive brand strategy of the client, and they must select the specialist vendors that can best implement that vision.  Additionally, they need to have great distributed project management chops in order to make sure that the vendors are delivering what they’ve promised, and that it is all centrally coordinated.