Earlier this year I looked at why, if IT could not report
to the CEO, then reporting to the Chief Marketing Officer makes good, if unconventional sense.
Enter the July/August edition of Harvard Business Review and an article by
Scott Brinker and Laura McLellan titled “The Rise of The Chief Marketing
Technologist”. Their article draws on Gartner research and predictions and some
of the statistics are remarkable, the most memorable being Gartner’s 2012
prediction that by 2017 the CMO will be spending more on technology than the
CIO will. This is not necessarily dreamland when considering that digital
marketing spending is experiencing double digit growth every year; CEO’s
identify digital marketing as the most important technology powered investments
their firm can make; e-commerce continues to rise rapidly; and the typical
marketing supply chain of agencies, media outlets and industry researchers are
embracing (and in many cases pioneered in many organisation) digital workflows.
The authors claim 81% of large companies now have a Chief
Marketing Technologist reporting directly into the marketing organisation, with
a (sometimes) dotted line to IT. Their role is to bridge the gap between IT and
marketing, working with the senior marketing executives, selecting and working
with 3rd party software and service providers, the general marketing
team and the CIO/IT organisation.
When I originally penned questions about the future of
internal IT departments around 10 years ago as part of my IT governance
lectures, I identified many emerging challenges to the typical IT team such as
automation, outsourcing and offshoring, increasingly user friendly
applications, and the rapidly increasing IT savvy of others in the organisation
especially the younger ‘digital natives’ as they filter through organisations
into management. At the time my IT management peers (including a CIO round
table I was a member of and presented this to) seemed unconcerned at these
potential challenges. The rapid ascension of the marketing department as the
dominant IT consumer in an organisation, is only now getting attention in the
CIO press and senior IT circles, is it too late?
Brinker, S. & McLellan, L., 2014, The Rise of the Chief
Marketing Officer, in Harvard Business Review, July-August 2014, p.83-85
Exploring the value of IT to organisations
email: david.gwillim@optusnet.com.au
blog: http://www.businessitvalue.blogspot.com/
