According to a 2013 report by Accenture, only one in 10 marketing and IT executives say collaboration between CIOs and CMOs is at the right level. That may sound surprising, but when you consider that CMOs are projected to spend more on information technology and analytics than CIOs by 2017, it probably shouldn’t be.
Indeed, the role of CMO is more tech-intensive than ever before. Just consider this digital marketing transit map produced by Gartner, which shows the massive array of digital technologies available to CMOs today. From ad tech to mobile to creative to commerce, it depicts a dizzying range of possibilities.
Today’s CMOs want to be able to use and implement new technologies rapidly and without delay, and there’s no doubt that they’re using quite a lot of them. One recent study, for instance, found that organizations are using an average of 61 cloud-based marketing apps.
“Even in our own team, we probably use a good 50 apps to get our work done, including HootSuite and Dynamic Signal for social media, Marketo for marketing automation, and Trello for our agile marketing sprints,” explains Jamie Barnett, vice president of marketing at cloud analytics company Netskope. “But that doesn’t mean IT doesn’t have a significant role to play.”
Barnett effectively serves as Netskope’s CMO, and says that the key to forging a symbiotic relationship with a CIO is recognizing the incredible value that the CIO brings to the table.
“As I look for business value in the technology itself, my CIO increasingly becomes my strategic partner and advisor,” Barnett says. “I need him to help me think through my goals and potential issues I may not be considering, such as how secure the apps are that my team is using, what happens when a disaster or technology failure occurs, whether we are properly safeguarding our customers’ data, and whether we’re getting the most out of the systems we’re using.”
Divergent desires
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The tension between CMOs and CIOs essentially boils down to this: CMOs want to act and innovate without going through IT approval processes. CIOs want CMOs to abide by IT standards and stop skirting around them—often via outside vendors. This is reflected by the fact that while 77 percent of CIOs agree that they need to be aligned with CMOs, only 56 percent of CIOs feel the same, according to the Accenture report.
As a base level, that’s the problem that must be solved.
“Both positions need to realize it is about teamwork,” says Eric Herzog, CMO at Violin Memory. “Business is a team sport, not an individual sport.”
Acting fast … and building trust
No one disputes the need for businesses—and particularly marketers—to act quickly in 2014. But doing so intelligently requires cohesive collaboration between both roles, and that often comes down to the personal relationship between two individuals.
“The best way to manage this is for the CMO and the CIO to forge a tight relationship,” Herzog says. “The CIO must respond to the rapidly changing environment a CMO deals with—for instance constant and rapid changes to a company’s website. You can’t wait two days for a press release to be posted.”
If the CMO and the CIO work together, both can impact the business positively and get things done without the CMO needing to create a “ghost IT” environment, he added, referring to scenarios in which CMOs bring on outside IT vendors as marketing service providers to get around restrictions placed by the CIO.
That kind of communication and personal report could solve one of the biggest problems plaguing the CMO-CIO relationship. According to Accenture, “Nearly half (45 percent) of CIOs report that they put marketing IT near or at the top of their priorities, whereas 64 percent of CMOs think marketing IT is placed at the bottom of the CIO’s priority list.”
Preparing for the future
Could giving CMOs more control over technology actually prove to be a good thing for CIOs? Some believe that loosening the reins—along with the rise of cloud computing—will free CIOs from mundane tasks like maintaining IT systems, and allow them to focus on new initiatives that can help their business innovate.
That loosening of the reins may prove inevitable. Adam Berke, president of AdRoll, believes that while this tension is primarily arising just between CMOs and CIOs today, the same tension will soon expand to every department.
“If CIOs don’t think about ways to provide scalable access to data, there will be tensions,” Berke says. “It’s not only marketing that’s becoming more technology driven; it’s every department.”
While the CMO and CIO relationship is often likened to a rocky marriage, technology will soon bring myriad intertwined c-suite relationships into play. A company’s ability to foster effective relationships among and across those relationships will play a big role in its future success.
Date: August 06, 2014