IT vs. Marketing: Time to Kiss and Make Up

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We — your company's customers and potential customers — are an entitled and spoiled lot. Blame it on shiny, pretty, easy-to-use technology. We want what we want when we want it. We expect companies (including our own employers) to seduce us with up-to-date technology that serves our needs well, is secure, and functions superbly. And for that to happen, IT and marketing need to pretty much be best friends.

Alas, in most organizations, this is not likely the case. "A new era of integration and cooperation between marketing and IT may be slowly taking shape, but there are significant issues of mistrust and misunderstanding that stand in the way," found a joint report from the CMO-CIO Alignment Imperative Council, the BPI network, and Accenture, which looked at issues surrounding the strategic alignment between marketing and IT. The survey polled 320 global marketing executives and 300 global IT executives on IT-marketing alignment issues from June through September 2010.

Snapshot of the IT-Marketing Divide

What lies at the heart of the friction between IT and marketing? Are the two groups staffed with inherently different personality types? "Perhaps to some extent," says David Raab, principal of Raab Associates, a marketing consultancy, "but this difference is overrated.  Really good marketers are analytical and organized; really good IT people are flexible and creative."

Lisa Arthur, who spent seven years at Oracle and is now CMO of Aprimo, a marketing software vendor, agrees. She points out that though on the whole there may be some differences between the personality types in the two groups (as there are between any groups that concentrate on a particular function), it is now not uncommon to see the same person hold the CMO and CIO title. 

The disconnection between IT and marketing has less to do with personality, and far more to do with issues like siloed functions, poor communication, and ill-defined scope. In a nutshell: "Marketers are frustrated by what they see as a lack of support from their enterprise IT departments," the CMO-CIO survey says. "Their counterparts complain that marketers often hold unrealistic expectations and don’t consult them when they choose new systems and technologies." Some survey respondents wrote in comments on these issues. From an IT respondent: “Marketers too often view requirements as a ‘confab of exceptions’ leading to overly custom solutions that barely address the most common use cases."

In a similar vein, Raab comments that whereas most IT departments are conservative about technology (especially new technology), particularly around issues such as security and reliability, marketing is a bit different. Marketing is also concerned about reliability and security, he says, but assumes IT will take care of that for them. "At most, marketing tends to be a bit more trusting that new technology will work as promised, while IT is rightly more skeptical and aware of what could go wrong," says Raab.

That skepticism has consequences. "IT rarely has expertise in new technologies, which are the ones that marketing really cares about," says Raab.

The outcome? Rogue IT. One marketing respondent to the CMO-CIO report wrote, "IT [at his company] 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." Another commenter said, “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."

Indeed, the survey findings underscore these issues. Almost half of marketing executives do not agree that their company’s CIO understands marketing objectives and requirements. The result? Only a quarter of marketers say they consult enterprise IT, contact center, and back office groups in selecting and deploying marketing solutions. In addition, nearly two-thirds of marketers note challenges implementing marketing and IT solutions; and the top reason given is that marketing is not a priority for IT. As for IT, 39% of IT executives report problems implementing marketing solutions and IT projects. They say one of the top reasons is that marketing has bypassed IT in implementing the project.

On the Bright Side

Despite this less-than-rosy picture, cause for hope does exist. "Marketing is becoming more technology-driven and analytical; IT is a bit more aware of the need to work with marketing or risk being ignored," says Raab. Says Arthur, companies today express business strategy through technology. She says that means IT isn’t just a department or group any more; it’s a common thread that enables innovation and business growth. What technology can do for us is on everyone's mind. "Sure, the IT guys still need to know TCP-IP with greater depth than colleagues in marketing, but today all understand—or should at least—the impact of HTML 5 or Java because these concepts are important to common objectives they share around website design and usability," she says. "It’s all about those common objectives." Moreover, Raab says, "finding common ground with business goals isn’t just possible, it’s imperative."

Technology is crucial to the success of most enterprises. It shapes customer experience, allows for marketing measurability, and gives marketing a powerful means of customer communication. In this, marketing and IT are more likely to agree, according to the CMO-CIO survey. Forty percent of IT execs and 44% of marketing execs think reaching and engaging the market has become more digitally driven. In addition, 65% of IT executives and 55% of marketing executives think technology now underpins the entire customer experience, and about half of both groups agree that access to customer intelligence is critical to competitive advantage.

But all this means that IT-marketing alignment is crucial: Measuring data, making those systems work well and other work of our digital age requires true IT-marketing alignment.

When these functions are in a silo, bad things happen, says Arthur.

Success in Unity

Aligning marketing and IT may not be an easy task, but there are concrete actions you can take to make such unity more likely. Here are a few.

Get to Know Your Customers. Whether you're talking about improving IT's ability to help lead innovation, get a seat at the proverbial table, or develop better understanding of the business, learning customers' needs is crucial. Aligning marketing and IT also hinges on this skill. Your work is to help improve the ability to communicate and listen to customers through your technology expertise, and you can't do that without learning about customer needs, behavioral patterns, and so on. The bright side is that you have an internal partner in this quest: marketing, whose very focus is to understand what makes customers tick.

Raab points out that many of the big financial services firms do a good job of IT-marketing alignment. The reason? "It’s about understanding that technology has a major impact on customers and ensuring this is considered in all decisions."

Partner with marketing. Tearing down the walls that separate marketing and IT rests on working together. You need to learn marketing's concerns and challenges and be able to explain IT's concerns in language marketing understands, and the only way to do that is to quite literally partner with marketing. "Realistically, the only way to overcome marketing-IT divide is to have IT people working within marketing, so that their goals are aligned," says Raab.

In addition, you can use that resource to make sure that technology projects are appropriate. To this end, involve senior marketing on projects that touch your customers directly or indirectly. "That’s pretty much every project in the company," he says, highlighting the need for collaboration. "There are many opportunities to improve the customer experience (or avoid making it worse) but only if someone is consulted who can see the customer perspective." And though you should work to understand those yourself, relying on marketing's expertise in that area is prudent.

Set parameters. A common obstacle to alignment is too-busy IT departments. All too often, Arthur says, the CMO and the marketing teams want help from IT, but other departments may be ahead of them in the IT priority line. And if marketing technology investments come from the IT budget, this adds more pressure on projects that compete for very limited or exhausted IT dollars.

Both the CIO and CMO need and want to strike a balance, so both must be sure to communicate clearly with one another on the scope of technology projects. If it’s a common goal such as increased revenue, the likelihood of misalignment is significantly reduced, says Arthur.  And staying on track requires regular IT-marketing “check-ins" and other forms of regular communication will help ensure long-term collaboration. Good dialogue between a leaders of the IT group and the marketing group enables understanding of shared vision, objectives and builds mutual trust.