Miscellaneous

In my experience the first and biggest task is to get organizations to indentify the problem space and have them realize they have to handle the application and software processes. Buying SMS or Altiris doesn't complete all the work, not even close. Once this understanding is in place it depends how the internal decision makers sees these tasks and how they can be solved, internally or by going external.

I've never really seen application owners doing this by themselves over time. What seems to happen most of the time is that some app owner go first and talk to infrastructure and set the standard, then others follow example and the organization picks it up - the first adopters will most likely get some form of reassignment and wider responsibility. If the organization is more formal then most likely they'll turn to some external partner when the initial discovery is made.

Best practices? I'm sure you'll find lots of books on "management of constantly changing organizations" but they are all different, hehe. And I'm just a tech.

I have a company using this model and they are going away from it. Packagers are not generialist but specialists. For quality packaging your packagers need to focus on doing their job well and managing the application environment. I find if people are occasional packagers they don't have the skill and they don't have the ownership over ensuring all the MSIs play nice together.