CMOs and CIOs need to make better friends
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Apparently CMOs and CIOs aren’t really getting along, according to a report from the CMO Council. The tension is building as investment in technology increases and the question of who will control both platform and budget remains unanswered.
The report, titled ‘Big Data’s Biggest Role, Aligning the CMO & CIO,’ found that fostering a more substantial relationship between CMOs and CIOs would result in substantial gains in the battle to navigate through the bottomless pit of digital data and advertising.
It found that a boom in data and the consequent boom in spending to manage data can be blamed for the shaky relationship between the CMO and CIO, clashing over control of marketing technology and technology budgets being one of the most common causes of their relationship troubles.
But the sheer volume of data being produced has put an added importance on getting this professional partnership right.
The gap, however, may in fact be narrowing between the two C-suite execs. According to 85% of the marketers and 85% of the IT executives said the relationship between the two is critical to the execution of customer-centric programs. It was also found that those marketers who have been successful in developing a positive relationship with their IT colleges were ‘singing the praises of their peers’.
“Joint goals, shared initiatives and success criteria tie our teams together, and there is very little ambiguity in what our goals are versus what marketing’s goals are,” Jay Ferro, CIO for the American Cancer Society said in the report.
“Watching the wall come down over the last year has been very rewarding. The CMO is my peer, and we both report to our staff president and COO. Over the next year, I see us continuing to focus on building our relationship as there are many opportunities to tie our annual outcomes to one another’s success.”
The report, released this month, comprised an in-depth analysis of 237 senior marketers and 211 senior IT executives. The report also included best-practice profiles from 33 marketing and IT executives from brands including AIG Bank, Allianz Life Insurance, Hilton Worldwide and Panasonic.
80% of marketers and 88% of IT executives both agreed that the priority is customer centricity and as the complexity that big data brings continues to multiply, the strong voice of the customer that is collected by IT and interpreted and translated by marketing must be heard It can’t used by a single team.
Big data statistics:
- Currently, about 2.5 exabytes of data are created each day,
- it is estimated that Walmart collects more than 2.5 petabytes of data every hour from its customer transactions,
- the volume of business data worldwide, across all companies, doubles every 1.2 years,
- ‘Dirty data’ costs the US economy $3.1 trillion dollars per year, and
- there will be a 40% projected growth in global data generated per year versus 5% growth in global IT spending.