Current State of Marketing – IT Cooperation
A new era of integration and cooperation between marketing and IT may be slowing taking shape, but there are significant issues of mistrust and misunderstanding that stand in the way. Marketers are frustrated by what they see as a lack of support from their enterprise IT departments. Their counterparts complain that marketers often hold unrealistic expectations and don’t consult them when they choose new systems and technologies.
Consider a few, sometimes humorous, complaints lodged by IT executives as part of our survey:
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“Certain senior management should not be allowed to use a computer…flapping in the breeze management style.”
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“Marketers too often view requirements as a ‘confab of exceptions’ leading to overly custom solutions that barely address the most common use cases.”
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“Marketing looks at digital solutions as answers to specific programs or campaigns and not as systems that will exist and be used again. This makes IT ‘disposable’ and budget for maintenance and constant improvement is never mapped.”
Marketers, on the other hand, express their own sometimes skeptical view of the IT department:
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“The marketing team is so frustrated by a continued disregard for breakdowns and issues that we have stopped asking for support and have been engaging outside vendors.”
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“IT is more concerned with securing customer accounts and customer data, yet blames marketing for vulnerabilities created by cloud solutions. But cloud solutions are the only way we can get things implemented that we really need.”
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“IT solutions are created in a box; quite often that box does not account for the needs of marketing departments…most large brand’s IT divisions are too process driven to truly deliver what’s needed to launch a successful social campaign.”
Toward Customer Relevance
Knowing what to do and actually doing it are, of course, two very different things. Most companies are increasing their investments in digital marketing and customer analytics, but their approach is frequently one of small, incremental improvements rather than significant transformational change. Most marketing executives surveyed in this study contend that they will raise their investments in digital channels over the next 12 months, and IT executives, for the most part, agree. Yet only about one-third of marketers and one-fifth of IT executives believe their companies are “heavily committed and invested” in digital marketing.
What’s more, both sides are reticent about taking on major transformational implementations, such as integrated marketing services platforms, performance measurement, multichannel campaign management, content management and enterprise marketing management systems. Instead, their increased spending is mostly directed toward areas like e-mail, website performance monitoring, lead generation and CRM.
Such investments are unlikely to deliver huge gains in the ability to achieve highly personalized customer engagement, deeper strategic insights, integrated brand experiences or breakthrough improvements in marketing efficiency.
Return to: The CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative: Driving Revenue through Customer Relevance