The stereotypical IT/Marketing feud has the visionary, revenue focused CMO barking orders at the process-oriented, cost conscious CIO. Perhaps you’ve heard horror stories of the CIO hijacking the marketing plan, refusing to implement it or worse, the entire IT staff quitting in revolt.
Hopefully it’s not that bad in your organization. The majority of eBusinesses do struggle with the IT/marketing relationship to some degree. 71% of eBusiness leaders surveyed by independent firm Forrester Research, Inc. report low to average levels of support for their business coming from IT. Many prefer to outsource key technology needs in part to avoid working with internal IT staff. Only 9% believe they are well supported by IT.
69% of eBusiness and channel strategy professionals report that they outsource their IT, development and infrastructure:
Source: Improving The eBusiness And IT Relationship, Brian K. Walker, Forrester Research, Inc., October 6, 2009. (Email subscribers: please enable images to view the diagrams from Forrester)
Common complaints from eBusiness teams are that IT is too slow, not reliable and doesn’t see things from the customer perspective. IT complains that marketing doesn’t give enough detail on requirements and doesn’t understand the work required to “make it so” in light of existing systems and platforms.
It doesn’t help the situation that Marketing and IT are held to different measures of success. Marketers and online store managers are responsible for growing sales and making customers merry. IT is typically concerned with keeping costs under control and minimizing risk. These competing objectives are the heart of the problem.
How can the Marketing and IT relationship be improved?
Join us on January 26th for our next webinar: Bridging the Technology and Marketing Divide for Ecommerce Success. Our guest speakers will be Smart Destinations’ CMO, Rob Schmults and CTO, Matt Higgins. Learn about how bridging the technology vs. marketing divide has gotten easier as the technology landscape has changed, yet these changes have not been sufficient to completely close the gap. Our speakers will share views on the way changes in enabling technology combined with better organizational collaboration can make your ecommerce business faster, better, and cheaper.
Webinar Takeaways:
• How web services, WYSIWUG, and GUI’s offer the allure of cutting IT out of the picture entirely
• Why marketers have to understand the importance of articulating solid requirements—and why change orders are beautiful things
• Why technologists cannot be passive order takers despite the safety such a pose offers—and how they can help marketers focus on what matters
• These lessons are applicable to SMB or enterprises with internal or external resources
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Reminds me of “men are from mars and women from venus”.
Except there are more than 2 groups in a business.
There are the techies babbling away in hexadecimal and longing for the good ole days before users were invented.
Then the fluffy marketeers dreaming about brand values and powerful straplines. The next re-design really really is going to work this time.
Add in the accountants getting pedantic and trying to be exactly wrong. Finally got a spreadsheet of sales figures from 2006.
Then the boss with shouting and swearing and banging the table. Blood pressure 300/200. Whoops here he co
Interesting article Linda! Glad I found your blog.
Being a fairly new e-tailer in Canada, I am seeing lots of useful information. Now, to just find the time to read it all
Cheers!
Frank
In larger companies this is a true minefield, but when I talk to smaller e-commerce owners that have 1-2 programmer on their staff, this isn’t a problem. I think it works in these small e-commerce companies because marketing and IT usually sits in the same physical room, and there aren’t this “us against them” feeling between the departments, as they know each other personally. In larger organizations the other department too easily becomes “faceless”.
This problem is all about management
Thanks For the informative blog post.I am waiting for this program.
Christian, Baymard Institute is right on target. This problem will persist as more hosted applications come on the market. I have found that even in larger organizations the Marketing departments are really pushing IT to think “outside the box.” I also believe that with the proliferation of social media / commerce IT depts. will be more open to testing 3rd party applications!