My wife often jokes about the early years of our marriage, when her perspective was "what's mine is mine and what's your's is mine." And my retort is usually, "I learned early to understand exactly who's the boss." Fortunately, it wasn't exactly like that, but we both agree we each started out with a similar "mine vs. yours" attitude to our limited resources. Such is life, such is human nature and perhaps such are the dynamics between two different organizations with a common challenge.
The common challenges facing the otherwise unlikely marriage of marketing and IT are "rise of the empowered consumer" and the advent of "big data." The latter relating to the former in that much of big data is customer data, and the result is that it's driving a need for marketing and IT to collaborate like never before. That organizational shift is happening in organizations big and small around the world, and best practices for navigating those potentially rocky waters are emerging.
To that point, here are five tips excerpted from a thought leadership magazine by the Association of National Advertisers that you may find useful in evolving your working relationship with your IT counterparts:
- Regular meetings
Schedule regular meetings to share insights. Remember, IT and marketing don’t just work with each other, they interact with a variety of departments across the organization. Sit-downs offer a great chance for both sides not only to weigh in on the project, but also to reveal how other departments, like customer service, could be impacting the results of marketing initiatives.. - Engage the necessary level(s)
Get the CEO involved. According to the findings of a new study from the CMO Council, in collaboration with SAS, companies that have the best CIO-CMO partnerships are those in which the CEO is perceived as being most responsible for the customer. Getting the CEO involved in discussion around big data helps both marketing and IT understand that their primary roles are to drive a customer-centric experience, not to advance their own agendas. - Involve them earlier
The time to talk about what kind of IT infrastructure is needed for a big data project is not right before implementation, but at the formulation of any customer engagement strategies. - Speak the same language
Learn the key words and phrases of the other department to build rapport and ease communications. CMOs and marketing departments need to have enough knowledge about IT so as not to be overwhelmed by jargon, as well as to gain an appreciation for constraints such as security and the budget impacting the CIO and the rollout of a big data project. - Plan for a shared future with IT
Look for new hires who understand both marketing and IT. Marketing technology is one of the hottest new business degrees, especially at the graduate level, so there should be plenty of talented people entering the job pool with an understanding of both the art of marketing and the science that’s driving data.
The name of the thought leadership e-magazine is: Big Data Drives Partnership - Marketing and IT can Play Together. It includes contributions from Tamara Dull about big data and from Adele Sweetwood about marketing analytics. It's well worth your time - take a look and let me know what you think.
