CIOs and CMOs have been experiencing a surprising amount of friction in the past several years.
According to a recent Accenture report, only one in ten marketing and IT executives says collaboration between the CIO and CMO is at an acceptable level. Part of the problem is that with marketing department’s soaring IT budget—Gartner says CMOs are projected to spend more money on information technology than CIOs by 2017—the lines between the offices are starting blur.
In today’s fast-paced, big-data world, CIOs and CMOs need each other more than ever. Here are three ways CIOs can reassert themselves while still working in tandem with the marketing department.
1. Open up the lines of communication.
CIOs and CMOs have a communication problem: Accenture reports that 64% of CMOs think marketing IT is being placed at the very bottom of the CIO priority list, while 45% of CIOs insist that marketing IT is at the top of their list.
The truth is that CIOs and CMOs are not so different. You both share a passion for data—IBM reports that 79% percent of CIOs say their top priority is to use data to derive insight and intelligence from company data, while 69% of CMOs say that integrating insights is their number-one data-related goal.
Business is moving faster than ever and CMOs can drive much higher results if they’re able to leverage new technologies without delay—and for that, they need you. To stay relevant to the marketing department, CIOs need to supply marketers with real-time data, break down walls between departments for closed-loop reporting and help them to achieve better results with analytics. When marketers feel like you can help them keep pace with market demands, they will rely on you as a partner who understands their needs.
2. Share your toys.
In today’s most effective organizations, CIOs and CMOs put aside their differences and work together to achieve corporate goals.
PWC reports that 70% of top-performing companies say they have a strong CIO-CMO relationship, compared with 45% for non-top performers. Oracle also revealed that more than two-thirds of senior marketing and tech leaders believe they’re more effective professionally when they collaborate.
By forging a tighter bond with the CMO, you can get closer to where the real innovation and strategic investment happens. And you can become a crucial ally—IBM says that 70% of CMOs feel underprepared to manage the explosion of data and glean useful insights from it.
Marketing is now almost entirely digital and thus leans heavily on technology. A successful marketing strategy today requires both marketing expertise and tech know-how. CIOs who work together with CMOs will be able to better understand the data needs of the organization and harness that data more strategically. It’s a win-win situation.
3. Play the talent card.
When it comes to querying databases, working with data cubes or building dashboards, marketers are out of their depth. That’s where IT can either be the hero who fills their need, or the ball and chain that slows them down.
Marketing executives want the right data at the right time—and they want to know the best way to use it. That’s where you come in. As the CIO, you (and your team) have the talent to generate those crucial insights. The IT department is perfectly positioned to embrace all available information sources across the organization and transform this disparate data into game-changing insights for marketers.
Domo brings it all together.
When data lives in different spreadsheets, systems and applications, it’s difficult for business leaders to see the big picture. They’re left to cobble together a host of disparate reports to understand trends, causations, and correlations in the data. Any omission—no matter how small—can leave them blind to information that could be critical to their next business decision.
It falls on the shoulders of IT experts like you to deliver the data that business leaders desperately need. By giving them that data—when and how they want it—you become more important than ever.
With Domo, IT executives can bring it all together for their organizations. Domo enables you to provide key stakeholders with data from your entire organization—sales, operations, marketing, HR, finance and more—in one place, in real-time, on any device.
Request a demo to see it in action.