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I have written this article 18 months too early. We stand about a year and a half away from the early-stage arrival of a truly exciting executive phenomenon: the marketing/ IT officer, a fully functional, switched-on executive who ambidextrously leads a combined marketing and IT organization. Tea-leaf reading aside, the data in this CIO Habitat research report -- gathered from surveys of 200 IT and business leaders -- is rife with portents of this momentous change. Among chief information and chief marketing officers, there is a sense that an era of business history is ending. As a futurist, I believe we are standing at the edge of something new.
Just about everyone I spoke with for this installment of Habitat agrees that the historical relationship between marketing and IT needs to change. Two reasons were cited:
- The tripartite advance of technology -- something I term the "law of mores" (more computer power, more storage and more bandwidth) -- has materially reduced the distance between a company and its customers.
- IT is the new secret ingredient of world-class brands (where brand equals customer experience, which is a function of IT competence).
The data collected regarding the executives with whom CIOs spend their time and their own assessment of relationship quality unambiguously demonstrate that IT and marketing execs are strangers to one another (see "The Relative Health of C-Level Relationships," at right). In fact, most CIOs would rather talk to HR than to their marketing
people (that's how sadly dysfunctional the relationship is). Historically, IT has been internally focused, operating along a set of structured rules that are established at the beginning of a development project. By contrast, marketing faces outward, toward the customer, and its practitioners are happiest when they can develop and refine rules on the fly.
"IT personnel have tended to view marketing as reactionary and demanding," observes Les Johnson, CIO at North Coast Electric Co. in Bellevue, Wash., and a CIO Decisions columnist. "Marketing personnel have tended to view IT as an arcane group of oddballs."
In a simpler and less connected time, the existing segregation of these executive groups wasn't an issue. IT and marketing didn't have to be intimate, get along or even be on the same page. IT's role, in fact, generally constituted only a little more than order taker from marketing. Ben Levitan, CEO at EnvoyWorldWide Inc. in Bedford, Mass., notes that while in the past IT executives were good at taking orders, they weren't so good at delivering the goods. "In general, the IT department has historically not served the needs of marketing," he says bluntly. Indeed, in other industries such as banking, several CIOs have noted that it was mainly IT's responsibility to provide data dumps for marketing, and marketers then brought these numbers to an outside agency to aggregate and analyze.
"These functions traditionally were very isolated, right- brain/left-brain kind of distinctions, with little perception of possible commonality," says Patty Van Tuyl, senior vice president of national production support in the consumer markets division at Countrywide Home Loans Inc. in Calabasas, Calif. "IT and marketing groups often have had reporting relationships to executives at different ends of the organizational spectrum, and these disciplines may not have come together except at the highest levels in organizations."
These days, however, Van Tuyl sees collaboration rising and barriers falling between IT and marketing, both "dramatically jump-started with increased use of the Internet by consumers." But what, if anything, do IT and marketing actually have in common? Both want to identify and satisfy customer requirements. Both find ROI calculations difficult to do well or convincingly. But most important, both are realizing how much their needs are converging as the Web changes so many aspects of how business is done.
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