Here's How You Can Bridge The CIO-CMO Divide

For years, there has been no shortage of software focused on automating SMB accounting, manufacturing and sales processes.

Now developers are rushing to bringing marketing teams into the fold with applications and services focused on everything from predicting customer sentiment to organizing outreach campaigns.

That shift is driving IT executives and their marketing counterparts to collaborate more closely than ever when it comes to technology investments: 83 percent of the more than 560 IT executives responding to a recent Accenture Interactive survey believe they need to focus on alignment.

About 69 percent of the 580 marketing professionals participating in the survey said the same. What's more, more than half of them rank marketing IT at or near the top of their priorities.

"The boundaries between marketing and IT are increasingly blurred in the digital marketplace," notes Accenture in its analysis of the data.

The reasons for this differ slightly, depending on the title. Among CIOs, here are the top three drivers:

  • Marketing is more about digital now, which requires more technology
  • Access to customer insight and intelligence is critical to competitive advantage
  • Technology now underpins and shapes the entire customer experience

While the first and third of these themes were also big for the CMOs surveyed by Accenture, three others scored at least as higher or higher in terms of importance:

  • Technology is more available and can be applied to marketing in new ways
  • Global complexity of marketing programs and channels needs IT innovation
  • Leveraging enormous volumes of data is increasingly important

Time To Learn New Skills

Why should technology solution providers care about any of this? For one thing, this disruption means not only the decision-makers for these investments will probably have very different titles than in the past. For another, if sales prospecting activities focus only on IT budgets, they could be overlooking serious opportunities.

"CMOs are bringing more digital talent in-house—including those with technology expertise—while continuing to rely on external agencies," Accenture notes in its survey analysis. "CIOs are hiring more technologists with marketing experience. Some companies are taking a different tack altogether and hiring chief digital officers to cut across traditional functional silos."
 

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