June 25, 2012
Marketing and IT On Different Planets
According to a new survey from IBM, 60 percent of marketers point to their lack of alignment with the company’s IT department as the biggest obstacle to reaching today’s consumers.
The frustration comes as the survey found marketers eagerly preparing to move beyond mobile coupons and deliver mobile advertising that reaches customers on their smartphone and tablets. According to the study, 34 percent of respondents stated that in less than 12 months they intend to deliver mobile ads, the highest rate of new marketing tactic adoption in the five-year history of IBM’s study. Overall, 46 percent of respondents are currently using mobile websites followed by 45 percent utilizing mobile applications, up from 40 percent and 44 percent respectively last year.
Among the other findings:
- While 48 percent of respondents believe that improved technology infrastructure or software will enable them to do more, nearly 60 percent indicated that lack of IT alignment and integration are significant barriers to the adoption of technology;
- While 71 percent believe integration across owned, earned and paid channels is important, only 29 percent are effectively integrating these different channels. When asked why, 59 percent said that existing systems are too disparate to integrate these channels. In social and mobile, only 21 percent and 22 percent of respondents run these tactics as part of integrated campaigns with the remainder conducting them in silos, discretely and on an ad hoc basis;
- While marketers continue to experiment with social media channels, 51 percent are not using this data to inform decisions about marketing offers and messages;
- When asked how they are using online visitor data, 65 percent of respondents are doing the basics, reporting and analyzing their data. Only one third are using this data to target one-to-one offers or messages in digital channels and less than 20 percent are using this online data to make one-to-one offers in traditional channels.
IBM’s State of Marketing 2012 surveyed more than 350 marketing professionals across a wide range of industries and geographies.
"Marketing and IT have no alternative but to emerge from their traditional silos and form a strong partnership that puts the business in a position to succeed," said Yuchun Lee, vice president, IBM Enterprise Marketing Management Group, in a statement. "CMOs and CIOs, an ‘odd couple’ in some respects, will be the catalysts in forging this union and enabling the types of personalized multichannel brand relationships that today’s customers demand."
BrainTrust
Recent Discussions
Discussion Questions
Discussion Questions: What are some of the major hurdles preventing smoother integration between IT and marketing departments? What steps may help corporations better align IT and marketing departments around social, mobile and overall online outreach initiatives?
Poll
Marketing and IT departments each have their own unique success criteria and compensation metrics. IT is measured based on technical performance such as bandwidth allocation, network ‘up time’ and efficiency, while marketing departments are measured based upon basket size, customer traffic and sales lift. These goals are typically counterproductive and IT departments don’t want to risk adding any new technologies that could risk their status quo performance criteria.
In order to get these departments aligned, their success and compensation metrics need to be aligned. These departments need to represent the brand and share in the risk and the reward of communicating efficiently and effectively with their customers and shoppers.
IT is not the enemy. Lack of vision and planning is. CIOs and IT staff are not against cooperating with CMOs and Marketing staff. We are all in this together. It may feel contentious but that is because the IT side of the house is typically frustrated with these deficiencies. Too often broad scale needs are asked for with no time to do it right. Leveraging data and insight to drive sound promotional practices and building the infrastructure to capture data/behavior from the myriad of social contact points is not easy. IBM suggested they “emerge from their silos” is but one component of change management.
The CEO or President must demand that they build a vision, a road map and align resources to then execute against the plan that leads the enterprise to strong/consistent return on investment — both from the technology added or supplemented and marketing campaigns executed with precision. If they can’t figure it out themselves then bring in outside counselors willing to break down the barriers that exist and create alignment to drive business metrics.
IT moves too slowly and marketing moves too quickly. It’s the nature of the beasts, I think.
Moving quickly is fine when you’re just producing “eye candy,” and that’s always how these initiatives start — or with analytics that have been generated by shipping data off to an outside provider. But then the realization dawns that “oops” — we need inventory information, might actually need to take orders here, and might need more complete analytics. That’s when marketing goes to IT asking for “forgiveness” and demanding data. IT hurries under pressure to get something together, and the tangle of point-to-point integration just gets another order of magnitude worse and more complex.
Perhaps even more interesting, our research in 2011 showed that those in charge of digital marketing have a disconnect with those in charge of traditional marketing as well. This creates brand fragmentation.
As we have been advising our clients for several years, an outside party needs to bring IT and marketing together into the same room so they can start to appreciate each others’ pain. This is not a one shot deal — it’s a process. For the largest companies, this should include the disparate marketing groups as well. The time to do it is when some part of marketing has ordered (or had built) a shiny new system with no input from traditional IT or the other marketing divisions.
Fundamentally, the biggest challenge in aligning marketing and IT is one of metrics. Marketing is compensated and measured based on the growth of revenue and margin, while IT is viewed as a cost center and is measured on cost containment and project completion. The results of those differences in metrics are that marketing seeks to work quickly and iteratively, while IT wishes to plan carefully and ensure completeness of solutions.
The only way to overcome these gaps are to consolidate metrics between the 2 organizations. Marketing must move quickly, and IT must move as fast, albeit in a thoughtful manner, to help achieve the business goals of the organization.
Many of the software tools and IT platforms currently being used by retailers to power promotions, customer communications, corporate web sites, mobile sites, social presence, BI, (and on and on) are just not robust enough to support the entire modern marketing process. I advise my clients to participate in an ongoing strategic planning process to determine a road map that drives the identification and implementation of realistic, cost-justifiable, and customer-focused solutions. This exercise gives them the path to cooperation and success and removes the internal finger-pointing.
I have a daughter who has a dual major in MIS and economics as well as a MBA. She works for a major US corporation and deals with IT, marketing and finance on a daily basis. She indicates to me that IT people have a very focused educational background and often have no real concept of economics, marketing or any other facets of business. They write code and that’s all they do, often without any comprehensive understanding of the purpose of the code they are writing. This is especially true if the code writers are off shore and have no direct contact or experience with your product.
Coders are the ones that make things work so marketing needs to spend time with the coders that are involved with their project and explain to them what they are trying to accomplish, why they are doing it and most importantly, when they need to have the coders’ solution in place and how that will impact the big picture. All is really required is a good job of communicating by the marketing department.
I think the big disconnects here are IT’s inadequate budgets, and the business’s insistence on keeping legacy programs that require constant maintenance. The “there’s an app for that” mentality drives IT crazy….
Gartner, in a recent research report, predicted an increase in the amount of technology decisions being driven by the CMO and marketing groups, rather than the CIO and IT groups.
If true, why is this? It could be based on the fact that marketing is going outside of the company and establishing service-based technology deals for use in social and mobile efforts. Many of these projects may not be “run through IT” as often or to the same degree as they were in the past. The problem with this is there is a potential disconnect made with the silos of IT’s internal infrastructure and the “outside” technologies being deployed and operated by marketing. How will data and cross-channel efforts be synchronized between systems?
CMO and CIO partnering is a critical issue.
There are problems/issues on both sides. IT systems are very complex today and take months or years to fully install correctly. This is due to the greater detail. A system installed a few years ago is unlikely to have significant social media capabilities. Social media allows marketing to go down one level from segment to consumer, but requires significant computer and infrastructure to support. Note this only applies to some consumers not all. As social media is new and most marketers are only experimenting, they can only provide IT with a moving target. This is not sufficient justification for replacing core systems.
The major hurdles tend to include lack of understanding of each others’ functions, misaligned incentives, inadequate or poorly allocated budgets, and, most damaging, lack of a clear strategy at the top. The solution involves devising a clear strategy in a process that jointly involves marketing and IT, funding that adequately and giving it a chance to work. It’s imperative that multi-channel retailers address this issue because their online competitors are technology-driven companies that much more naturally integrate IT into the business.
Both marketing and IT have to be able to view insights around and about the consumer, just as the financial, sales, and operations departments need to do.
It’s a consumer-centric world, and that consumer is hanging onto dollars that each department wants to see invested in their company’s goods and services.
The biggest hurdle preventing “smoother integration” between CIO teams and CMO teams is more collaboration and mutual understanding of each area’s role, constraints and opportunities.
Marketing cannot and should not make decisions unilaterally (perception, occasionally reality of course) and expect IT to execute any more than IT can expect marketing to take tools and utilize them based on the will of IT. It takes coordination and collaboration so that marketing creates strategies and tactics based on (existing) technology capabilities or alternatively, based on working with IT to define and establish requirements to fill gaps in those capabilities.
This closer working relationship between marketing and IT is happening and only going to accelerate given the increasing needs of marketers for technologies. It is reminiscent of the continuing need for marketing to also work with finance. Most “above the line” marketers can’t do math much less accounting, though this is changing. The same is true for data.
The winners are those that speak multiple languages within the corporate world and marketers that understand finance and technology will be the winners.
Twenty years ago there was very little being done on the internet. Almost all of the two way communication throughout the world was conducted in person over wires. Most of the men and women in key executive “non IT” private corporate positions today entered the work force 20 years ago. Their knowledge and experience of technologies and practices is obsolete, or dated if you wish. In the last ten years I am unaware of any executives going back to school to fully update themselves for what is now the day to day playing field.
As for myself, I enrolled and graduated from a 36 credit update course in 2003/2004 this took a full year. This not only gives me a firsthand understanding of what is going on, but it also yields a trained perspective of how big a gap there is between most sales and marketing executives and their own IT departments. Sadly the gap seems to be widening as we speak. This problem is the reason that there is so much opportunity for any size company to become a dominate player as well as the reason so many companies will fail. There is not a lot of genuine talent out there, but what is out there is for hire.
IT is particularly challenged with supporting marketing requests because by nature, marketing is much more fluid in approaches and tactics. IT is often based on apply, replication, scaling, while marketing is based on short-term messaging, promotion and campaigns. Certain aspects like CRM is easier for IT to support because it is process driven, other areas like social media is much harder.
During my tenure with Fleming Foods, I attended closed training sessions about dealing with the politics of the IT department. They were called the voodoo sessions, because IT was commonly referred to as the Voodoo Department. The door to their department was locked from the inside. They struck clandestine supplier agreements with IBM and NCR. Everything was secret and impenetrable. Every request required months.
Nothing has changed. They are still voodoo departments with legacy relationships with the old systems rather than the new.
Transparency is the key. Not Obama “transparency,” but a truly clear working charter between those who sell and those who support. I believe the keys are these: First, hire IT heads that are 25-35 years old. And second, eliminate all contracts with legacy systems suppliers and start over from scratch with oversight from the accounting department.
The pace of change is one of the largest hurdles preventing better collaboration with marketing and technology groups. Getting leaders of these business functions to find concurrent paths to solve business challenges is a great way to start.
IBM is hosting two first-of-its-kind discussions with CMOs and CIOs from leading companies to explore how a new era of computing is transforming the enterprise. One was just held early in June in New York City. Another will be held in Paris in October 2012.
One that comes into mind is: Time/Complexity of projects. Most marketing departments are used to digital campaigns that agencies crank out at lighting speeds (1-3 month campaign sites or apps). Hence they have an unrealistic expectations of tech related projects, and think that all IT projects have the same complexity. This results in marketing trying to force IT into a rigorous campaign go-live schedule. Which most of IT departments puts up instant walls (i.e. lack of proper analysis, time, and resources).
Several of our agency’s clients absolutely loathe their IT, and would do anything to put projects in the agencies hand’s. Which works from a campaign execution perspective, BUT that also effectively silos off the campaign/digital and internal Sales/CRM data.
As an agency, I’m used to standing on the marketing department’s side, so the solution we normally propose is to cut out IT completely and bring in outside vendors. This way we can still achieve client’s objectives, and won’t have to wait forever for internal IT. All we then need from IT is a list of compliance regulations that we’d have to abide by in order for system integration/deployment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really solve the real issue between the 2 parties. But from my perspective, internal IT exists to support the business, and if they fail to do that by putting up walls, then the marketing client have all the right to seek outside help.
More Discussions
Should Grocers Pay Online Influencers?
What should the relationship between grocers and influencers look like?Will Google’s Pomelli Photoshoot Live up to the Hype for Retail SMBs?
Will Pomelli’s Photoshoot tool be a game-changer for retail SMBs?Mass Retailers, Including Walmart, Tie Grocers on Penetration For the First Time: What’s Next?
Walmart and other mass-channel retailers are reaching dominant penetration levels. What’s next?
Marketing and IT departments each have their own unique success criteria and compensation metrics. IT is measured based on technical performance such as bandwidth allocation, network ‘up time’ and efficiency, while marketing departments are measured based upon basket size, customer traffic and sales lift. These goals are typically counterproductive and IT departments don’t want to risk adding any new technologies that could risk their status quo performance criteria.
In order to get these departments aligned, their success and compensation metrics need to be aligned. These departments need to represent the brand and share in the risk and the reward of communicating efficiently and effectively with their customers and shoppers.
IT is not the enemy. Lack of vision and planning is. CIOs and IT staff are not against cooperating with CMOs and Marketing staff. We are all in this together. It may feel contentious but that is because the IT side of the house is typically frustrated with these deficiencies. Too often broad scale needs are asked for with no time to do it right. Leveraging data and insight to drive sound promotional practices and building the infrastructure to capture data/behavior from the myriad of social contact points is not easy. IBM suggested they “emerge from their silos” is but one component of change management.
The CEO or President must demand that they build a vision, a road map and align resources to then execute against the plan that leads the enterprise to strong/consistent return on investment — both from the technology added or supplemented and marketing campaigns executed with precision. If they can’t figure it out themselves then bring in outside counselors willing to break down the barriers that exist and create alignment to drive business metrics.
IT moves too slowly and marketing moves too quickly. It’s the nature of the beasts, I think.
Moving quickly is fine when you’re just producing “eye candy,” and that’s always how these initiatives start — or with analytics that have been generated by shipping data off to an outside provider. But then the realization dawns that “oops” — we need inventory information, might actually need to take orders here, and might need more complete analytics. That’s when marketing goes to IT asking for “forgiveness” and demanding data. IT hurries under pressure to get something together, and the tangle of point-to-point integration just gets another order of magnitude worse and more complex.
Perhaps even more interesting, our research in 2011 showed that those in charge of digital marketing have a disconnect with those in charge of traditional marketing as well. This creates brand fragmentation.
As we have been advising our clients for several years, an outside party needs to bring IT and marketing together into the same room so they can start to appreciate each others’ pain. This is not a one shot deal — it’s a process. For the largest companies, this should include the disparate marketing groups as well. The time to do it is when some part of marketing has ordered (or had built) a shiny new system with no input from traditional IT or the other marketing divisions.
Fundamentally, the biggest challenge in aligning marketing and IT is one of metrics. Marketing is compensated and measured based on the growth of revenue and margin, while IT is viewed as a cost center and is measured on cost containment and project completion. The results of those differences in metrics are that marketing seeks to work quickly and iteratively, while IT wishes to plan carefully and ensure completeness of solutions.
The only way to overcome these gaps are to consolidate metrics between the 2 organizations. Marketing must move quickly, and IT must move as fast, albeit in a thoughtful manner, to help achieve the business goals of the organization.
Many of the software tools and IT platforms currently being used by retailers to power promotions, customer communications, corporate web sites, mobile sites, social presence, BI, (and on and on) are just not robust enough to support the entire modern marketing process. I advise my clients to participate in an ongoing strategic planning process to determine a road map that drives the identification and implementation of realistic, cost-justifiable, and customer-focused solutions. This exercise gives them the path to cooperation and success and removes the internal finger-pointing.
I have a daughter who has a dual major in MIS and economics as well as a MBA. She works for a major US corporation and deals with IT, marketing and finance on a daily basis. She indicates to me that IT people have a very focused educational background and often have no real concept of economics, marketing or any other facets of business. They write code and that’s all they do, often without any comprehensive understanding of the purpose of the code they are writing. This is especially true if the code writers are off shore and have no direct contact or experience with your product.
Coders are the ones that make things work so marketing needs to spend time with the coders that are involved with their project and explain to them what they are trying to accomplish, why they are doing it and most importantly, when they need to have the coders’ solution in place and how that will impact the big picture. All is really required is a good job of communicating by the marketing department.
I think the big disconnects here are IT’s inadequate budgets, and the business’s insistence on keeping legacy programs that require constant maintenance. The “there’s an app for that” mentality drives IT crazy….
Gartner, in a recent research report, predicted an increase in the amount of technology decisions being driven by the CMO and marketing groups, rather than the CIO and IT groups.
If true, why is this? It could be based on the fact that marketing is going outside of the company and establishing service-based technology deals for use in social and mobile efforts. Many of these projects may not be “run through IT” as often or to the same degree as they were in the past. The problem with this is there is a potential disconnect made with the silos of IT’s internal infrastructure and the “outside” technologies being deployed and operated by marketing. How will data and cross-channel efforts be synchronized between systems?
CMO and CIO partnering is a critical issue.
There are problems/issues on both sides. IT systems are very complex today and take months or years to fully install correctly. This is due to the greater detail. A system installed a few years ago is unlikely to have significant social media capabilities. Social media allows marketing to go down one level from segment to consumer, but requires significant computer and infrastructure to support. Note this only applies to some consumers not all. As social media is new and most marketers are only experimenting, they can only provide IT with a moving target. This is not sufficient justification for replacing core systems.
The major hurdles tend to include lack of understanding of each others’ functions, misaligned incentives, inadequate or poorly allocated budgets, and, most damaging, lack of a clear strategy at the top. The solution involves devising a clear strategy in a process that jointly involves marketing and IT, funding that adequately and giving it a chance to work. It’s imperative that multi-channel retailers address this issue because their online competitors are technology-driven companies that much more naturally integrate IT into the business.
Both marketing and IT have to be able to view insights around and about the consumer, just as the financial, sales, and operations departments need to do.
It’s a consumer-centric world, and that consumer is hanging onto dollars that each department wants to see invested in their company’s goods and services.
The biggest hurdle preventing “smoother integration” between CIO teams and CMO teams is more collaboration and mutual understanding of each area’s role, constraints and opportunities.
Marketing cannot and should not make decisions unilaterally (perception, occasionally reality of course) and expect IT to execute any more than IT can expect marketing to take tools and utilize them based on the will of IT. It takes coordination and collaboration so that marketing creates strategies and tactics based on (existing) technology capabilities or alternatively, based on working with IT to define and establish requirements to fill gaps in those capabilities.
This closer working relationship between marketing and IT is happening and only going to accelerate given the increasing needs of marketers for technologies. It is reminiscent of the continuing need for marketing to also work with finance. Most “above the line” marketers can’t do math much less accounting, though this is changing. The same is true for data.
The winners are those that speak multiple languages within the corporate world and marketers that understand finance and technology will be the winners.
Twenty years ago there was very little being done on the internet. Almost all of the two way communication throughout the world was conducted in person over wires. Most of the men and women in key executive “non IT” private corporate positions today entered the work force 20 years ago. Their knowledge and experience of technologies and practices is obsolete, or dated if you wish. In the last ten years I am unaware of any executives going back to school to fully update themselves for what is now the day to day playing field.
As for myself, I enrolled and graduated from a 36 credit update course in 2003/2004 this took a full year. This not only gives me a firsthand understanding of what is going on, but it also yields a trained perspective of how big a gap there is between most sales and marketing executives and their own IT departments. Sadly the gap seems to be widening as we speak. This problem is the reason that there is so much opportunity for any size company to become a dominate player as well as the reason so many companies will fail. There is not a lot of genuine talent out there, but what is out there is for hire.
IT is particularly challenged with supporting marketing requests because by nature, marketing is much more fluid in approaches and tactics. IT is often based on apply, replication, scaling, while marketing is based on short-term messaging, promotion and campaigns. Certain aspects like CRM is easier for IT to support because it is process driven, other areas like social media is much harder.
During my tenure with Fleming Foods, I attended closed training sessions about dealing with the politics of the IT department. They were called the voodoo sessions, because IT was commonly referred to as the Voodoo Department. The door to their department was locked from the inside. They struck clandestine supplier agreements with IBM and NCR. Everything was secret and impenetrable. Every request required months.
Nothing has changed. They are still voodoo departments with legacy relationships with the old systems rather than the new.
Transparency is the key. Not Obama “transparency,” but a truly clear working charter between those who sell and those who support. I believe the keys are these: First, hire IT heads that are 25-35 years old. And second, eliminate all contracts with legacy systems suppliers and start over from scratch with oversight from the accounting department.
The pace of change is one of the largest hurdles preventing better collaboration with marketing and technology groups. Getting leaders of these business functions to find concurrent paths to solve business challenges is a great way to start.
IBM is hosting two first-of-its-kind discussions with CMOs and CIOs from leading companies to explore how a new era of computing is transforming the enterprise. One was just held early in June in New York City. Another will be held in Paris in October 2012.
One that comes into mind is: Time/Complexity of projects. Most marketing departments are used to digital campaigns that agencies crank out at lighting speeds (1-3 month campaign sites or apps). Hence they have an unrealistic expectations of tech related projects, and think that all IT projects have the same complexity. This results in marketing trying to force IT into a rigorous campaign go-live schedule. Which most of IT departments puts up instant walls (i.e. lack of proper analysis, time, and resources).
Several of our agency’s clients absolutely loathe their IT, and would do anything to put projects in the agencies hand’s. Which works from a campaign execution perspective, BUT that also effectively silos off the campaign/digital and internal Sales/CRM data.
As an agency, I’m used to standing on the marketing department’s side, so the solution we normally propose is to cut out IT completely and bring in outside vendors. This way we can still achieve client’s objectives, and won’t have to wait forever for internal IT. All we then need from IT is a list of compliance regulations that we’d have to abide by in order for system integration/deployment. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really solve the real issue between the 2 parties. But from my perspective, internal IT exists to support the business, and if they fail to do that by putting up walls, then the marketing client have all the right to seek outside help.