Retailers need to speak with one voice in technology decisions. Marketing has a far greater budget than IT and often spends a good chunk of that budget creating a mini-IT staff. IT folks are trained in the disciplines of technology whereas marketing is not. This dynamic weakens a retailer’s position to get the best technology for the organization. Retailers need to speak with one technology voice. Just like in raising children, an organization needs to speak with one voice. A vendor will exploit the differing voices if given the opportunity.

There are few reasons, and some are structural, organizational and cultural. At the risk of some generalizations:

1. If reporting into a CFO, the IT organizations tend to be overly cost driven, focused on maintaining an existing technology stack;
2. There is a lot of innovation in marketing technology, and a good portion of it is not enterprise-ready in terms of security, performance and service levels. When IT gets into the mix and raises objections on these, they are seen as road blockers, and will cause friction with marketing leaders who see lost opportunities with not implementing those technologies.
3. Skills gap. More than ever before, data, analytics and insights make the difference to the strategy. If the organization does not have a data management team or a chief data officer, those roles fall into IT. While CIOs may be business savvy, they do not have teams and resources to execute.

While all of the above true, there are plenty of IT departments and leaders who are stuck in yesterday and refuse to think out of the box and innovate.

Departmental silos are the single biggest hindrance to success in retail. The speed of change driving customer attention and loyalty makes it imperative for companies to be able to shift online content and brand narrative on a dime to stay aligned with current events and cultural sentiment. The only way to have this flexibility is for marketing and IT to work in lock step, and since trust is a two way street, both teams must have equal weight to their voice to avoid any backsliding into silos. Making decisions across departments is hard, primarily because we haven’t had to learn how. Forcing teams to work together may be rocky and feel slow initially, but once this skill is mastered then the shackles of siloed thinking are permanently removed.

Since the beginning of time, the “team motto” for almost all corporations is “every department for itself!” You can’t “drive” collaboration, you can only create a circumstance that invites it. Only when you’re not driving do you get to see and appreciate what’s all around you.

The old pyramid structure in which every interest has to fight for itself and where the executive group administers both carrots and sticks assumes that collaboration (aka teamwork), performance and profitability – indeed leadership itself – are simply mechanical processes. In truth, the desire for common unity where one of marketing’s primary goals is the success of technology and vice versa is a matter of vision, spirit, heart, emotion and love. We get nervous with those words so we call it “culture” a word that, once again, tries to mechanize the challenge.

We get so consumed driving collaboration we forget to establish the “Why?” Like throwing the family into the car for a long trip without telling them where.

Some years ago I read predictions that Martech investment would mean that a CMO had more tech spend than a CIO – so the current situation should not be a surprise. The bigger issue is that this is something that will move into other areas too as technology expands – customer service, supply chain, finance. All areas where technology is likely to play a bigger part in the coming years. The approach taken in terms of partnership between CIO and CMO will need to act as a template for others. Blended technology and business teams with shared goals and measures are likely to be a great start, building empathy between both parts of the organization in terms of possibilities and restrictions.

The disconnect between marketing and IT has been in place for decades, but it has reached epic proportions today because of the rapid evolution of digital, enabling shoppers to be super savvy and intelligent in their selections. In many respects, today’s shoppers have more information than the marketers or IT professionals who are supposedly leading them — which makes the collaboration among C-level execs so critical. The primary reason is to win the consumer back, to earn the trust and confidence of the shopper — to stay ahead of the shopper so that brands can deliver moments of delight, surprise and value. Can this be accomplished with shared leadership? Nope, co-sharing duties brings a whole new litany of issues. It’s imperative that the CEO effectively manage his/her team and it’s one of the most important priorities in modern times.

Why focus on just the CMO/CIO relationship? What about the CIO/every other department relationship? If a company prioritizes marketing’s relationship with IT they will ignore the rest of the business, be less efficient and probably unable to deliver on whatever promises the marketers make anyway.

CIOs need to be able to listen to and understand the needs of all parts of the business then work with the leadership team to set priorities. There is no point having an amazing tech-led marketing offering if you are not able to execute against it.

After having worked on a project to bring IT and Marketing businesspeople and academics on several projects that have since been abandoned, here is my insight. In general, IT professionals want to make things work which means performing an activity reliably. They are not especially interested in the outcome x as long as the process does what is is supposed to do. An example is that on one project I worked, someone who was one of three experts able to make a piece of software work. He walked me through the process and explanation. I had an overall understanding of the process, but not all the details. At the end of the explanation, I asked what would a marketing manager do with these results. His response, “wow, you ask hard questions. I have no idea.” On the other hand, marketers, in general, receive very little technology training except for statistics. They are concerned about the customers, the tools, the responses, and predictability. Having tried to teach marketing faculty and students how to use some of… Read more »

It is best to understand that these are two different types of people. Marketing is creative, always looking for a point of difference. Providing good data that marketing can search and search is what they need. Additionally, they want the ability to measure each element they change and do not know what it will be tomorrow.

Technology lives in a logical path. They have a defined end product that does not change and only needs to be prepared. Further technology works with numbers and if/then statements. Another way to look at is marketing changes daily and technology does not. Equal partners should envision the end environment and work together each project to move closer to the goal.