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Alternatives to dealing with hodge-podge hell

Have your own in-house IT department.

This makes sense if you are a large company or if IT is the
heart of your business, but of course for smaller companies it is not
an option.

For many smaller companies, there will be one overworked individual
who can say with a straight face "I am the IT department", and often its
not even their only role. However talented and hard working this
person is, chances are they don't have the resources necessary
to streamline things properly.

Even larger companies with a whole team of people working in IT
can still have problems. Due to the delights of office politics,
even having your own IT department does not necessarily free
you from hodge-prodge hell. Each department has their own priorities,
and this includes the IT department. Funnily enough, most people
are more interested in making their own job easier, not yours.

Hire a software developer or some consultants.

This is a route fraught with danger. For a start, unless you have
a background in software development, you will probably
have a hard time telling a good programmer from an average one.
This is important because software development is a strange field.
Good programmers are not 20% or 50% more productive than average
ones, they are more like 1000% as productive (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month)

Secondly, unless you have that truly rare gift of being able to
properly manage a software project you are liable to run into difficulties.
Most software projects come in late and over-budget. This is true
all the way from a custom website with a few lines of php to multi billion
projects by the largest organisations in the world. Why this happens
is up for debate, but the fact that it happens is not.
Read this is you are interested. http://spectrum.ieee.org/sep05/1685

Lastly, hiring a temporary worker immediately induces a conflict of
interest. The sooner they finish, the less they earn. No matter how honest
and hard working this person is, the fact that successful completion
of the project puts them out of a job is a less than ideal situation.