Never before has the right technology been so essential to successful marketing. As a result, technology purchases and budgets are no longer the sole purview of CIOs. The shift has often put CIOs and CMOs at odds, at the same time as the two roles need to be more collaborative than ever.
Just this week, I’ve been on customer calls with marketing and IT teams who are working together to make sure their technology is aligned. We love to see that coordination between marketing and IT, since it usually leads to better results: better buy-in throughout the project, faster technical deployments and integrations, and a lot less risk.
A new report from Accenture looks at CMOs and CIOs’ rocky relationship, where it’s improving and what challenges stand in the way of successful collaboration between the two roles.
This week’s Marketing Performance News Roundup brings you five articles with more on the Accenture report and other information to help you understand changes you can make to bridge the gap between CMOs and CIOs.
- Accenture: CMO/CIO Relationship Closer Than Ever, But Challenges Persist. FierceCMO: “The study, “Cutting Across the CMO-CIO Divide,” which was based on a survey of more than 1,100 senior marketing and IT executives around the globe, found that 43 percent of marketers and 50 percent of IT leaders said their relationship with the other has improved over the past year. Also, 23 percent said collaboration between the two teams is currently at the right level, up 10 percent over last year’s survey that indicated that only one in 10 respondents felt collaboration was at the right level.”
- CMOs and CIOs are Getting Along Better, But Increasingly Frustrated with Execution. CMO: “In addition, the report found marketing and IT departments are aligned on the importance of marketing tech, with more than half ranking it at or near the top of their priority list (52 percent and 53 respectively). In 2014, 69 per cent of CMOs said they recognised the need to align with IT, up from 56 percent in 2012, against 83 percent of CIOs, up from 77 percent in 2012.”
- CIOs and CMOs Suffer From Failure to Communicate. CIO: “The battle over the tech budget has also harmed the CIO-CMO relationship. There’s no question more of a CMO’s budget is being allocated for tech in areas such as cloud-based digital marketing software, customer analytics and social media. Communication troubles crop up because 68 percent of CMOs believe a boost in their tech spend will come at the expense of the CIO’s budget, meaning budget power is shifting away from the CIO to the CMO.”
- CIO-CMO Relationship: Plagued By Digital Pretenders. InformationWeek: “Why do CIOs have strong relationships with every other executive in the C-suite except the CMO? We can speculate that budgets, historical interactions, or perceived ineffectiveness of IT are the barriers to CIOs and CMOs working together, but when you boil it down, CIOs and CMOs often don’t see eye to eye because they have their backs to each other.”
- The CIO and CMO Perspective on Big Data. CIO: “Marketing can ease some of the CIO’s stress by approaching the big data ecosystem of suppliers in a more focused way. ‘It’s not uncommon for marketing to want to use many different agencies and buy many different off the shelf tools for different jobs,’ says Meyers of Biogen Idec. ‘We try to show them the value of having inputs in as few places as possible. The more diverse your data sources the harder it is to extract something useful.’”
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