Bridging the Ecommerce Technology and Marketing Divide

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.

Sign up today.

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