There are fundamental differences in how marketing and IT see their roles, and the world. And it's bad for a company's brand when the CIO and marketing execs don't get along.
InformationWeek, By Brian Gillooly, November 17, 2009 03:04 PM
When my colleague Chris Murphy recently raised the issue of IT's impact on brand, and specifically the role the CIO plays in brand development, a reader responded by calling Chris' thoughts "blindingly obvious." The reader later added, "I can't believe that there's a CIO on the planet who doesn't understand this."
Sadly, there are plenty of CIOs who don't understand this, or at least don't pay heed to it to the extent it deserves in the rapidly unfolding collaborative IT environment. It's an environment in which customers, who ultimately determine what a brand means and what value it has, are increasingly taking control of their own buying experiences through the use of collaborative technologies and social media.
Forbes CIO Mykolas Rambus talks about managing cost cutting, the changing role of the CIO, building leadership within, and his company's high priority on mining intelligence from vast amounts of data.
Chris' column prompted a call from Bruce Rogow, a good friend of mine who speaks with more CIOs than anyone I know through his "IT Odyssey," a trek Bruce makes each year across the country and during which he visits with an average of 120 CIOs and other executives. His mission is simply to better understand the role of the CIO and the impact of IT and to track changes in how IT is used and valued in the organization. Bruce told me that recently he's been making an effort to meet with both the CIO and top marketing folks at some of the firms he visits to better understand the impact of IT on the brand. It's part of a project he's working on for Don Tapscott's nGenera Insights program called "Marketing 2.0."
Bruce says that, by and large, marketing people and IT people just don't get along. That might not surprise some (especially those who think that IT people don't get along with anybody!) The reason is that there's a fundamental difference in how each group thinks about its role: While this is admittedly a generalization, IT people tend to look at things linearly and in absolutes; marketing people tend to look at things conceptually and more fluidly. The problem is, both are responsible for building, protecting, and projecting the brand, so they've got to figure out a way to communicate and work together better.
In most of Rogow's Odyssey visits, he says IT and marketing--and specifically many CIOs and CMOs--simply don't get along. In one visit, he sat with the CIO awaiting someone from marketing who never showed. In a conversation that Rogow says typifies the relationship between the two officers at many companies, the CIO told Rogow he wasn't surprised by the no-show and that he "can't stand the [CMO]." According to Rogow, a staggering 10% or less of the 150 or so CIOs he's met with in the past year described the relationship with marketing in a positive way.
But the problem doesn't lie just with marketing, or with a perception (accurate or not) that IT is a weird science that few others can hope to grasp. One part of the problem, and a very correctable one, is the need for IT to become more flexible, says Rogow. IT has to figure out a way to work differently--become more agile, assign the right people to a project, worry about nuances that they may have dismissed before, and understand they're dealing with people who sometimes don't quite know what they're asking for. As I said earlier, marketing tends to focus on a concept--unlike, say, manufacturing, which generally knows what it wants from IT.
This need for flexibility in a collaborative world as a means of building the brand is most apparent when you consider that, in their research on the Marketing 2.0 project, the nGenera Insight folks discovered that there are at least 81 distinct IT customer touch points. These include some of the obvious like order status systems, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as things like kiosks, mobile applets, and online simulations. That's a lot of links in the brand chain that have to be firing on all cylinders, and it creates quite a burden on IT moving forward. CIOs who don't get that are in for a world of hurt when a disgruntled customer decides to use some of those 81 touch points to express displeasure among equally influential customer cohorts.
Rogow says there are three primary reasons that IT has begun influencing the marketing experience, and therefore the brand, so much over the past three to five years.
First, marketing has shifted dramatically to include the customer experience, partly due to technology, and partly as result of a cultural phenomenon. The second is the number of times and ways that IT is touching the customer today (those 81 distinct touch points). And the third is how IT is delivered, which can have a profound impact on customers' perception of brand.
While Rogow claims that the assertion in Chris Murphy's column by Andy Bateman, CEO of Interbrand New York, that, in building brands, "the CIO is as important a change agent as the CMO" is a bit of hyperbole, he agrees wholeheartedly with the concept that the CIO and IT are integral to helping define the value of the brand.
So what should CIOs do? One is to work on relationships. At companies where the IT and marketing teams are doing well at brand management, the CIO has generally, over a period of time, developed a working relationship at the senior level, executive management level, and staff level, where there is now a certain amount of both trust and distinctive competence. What's critical, says Rogow, is to force what one CIO called "trust incidents" between IT and marketing, as well as between IT and the customer. Don't assume that if you have confidence in one particular area, such as building supply chain systems, that your IT teams have the skills and working relationship to automatically succeed with another area of the business, such as creating effective mobile applets for the marketing department. Keep working at it.
It also may require another look at the enterprise architecture. Some companies will hire an IT person to work in marketing, and vice versa, and assume cross-pollination will just work. But that may only be a cosmetic solution: If you have 16 order-entry systems, Rogow says, you've still got a problem because of the confusion and complexity it can create for a marketing department. "You've got to get lean" by streamlining and cutting wasteful processes and systems, he says.
Ultimately, says Rogow, where CIOs and IT teams are great at developing order-entry and inventory systems, managing PCs, and building global supply chains, one of the next major challenges for IT is to step up to support the brand, and to ensure that the company is aware of IT's role in that.
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