Marketing/IT Relationship Challenges Present Roadblocks to Customer-Centricity

April 2, 2013

This article is included in these additional categories:

Analytics, Automated & MarTech | Data-driven

CMOCouncil-Marketing-IT-Relationships-Apr2013Asked to describe their relationship with their CIO/IT department, just 12% of marketers indicated it to be a “total partnership and alignment,” according to [download page] a new survey from the CMO Council. While few described their relationship as “nonexistent” (5%) or “tense” (3%), most reported that they are aligned but still challenged to execute on priority projects (39%) or challenged by divergent priorities and limited budgets (28%). The results don’t bode well for marketers looking to leverage enterprise-wide data for customer-centricity.

That appears to be one of the main takeaways from the CMO Council’s extensive report. The leading value of the marketing/IT relationship (as cited by marketers) is the ability to gather data across the enterprise, but separately, marketers say that functional silos that prohibit the aggregation of such data remain the chief roadblock to customer centricity.

Presented with a list of critical touchpoints that demonstrate customer centricity to the customer, a leading 49% of marketers reported that the top roadblock to optimizing the touchpoints was “functional silos that make data aggregation impossible.” Separately, marketers also indicated that the main obstacle they face in achieving a truly customer-centric organization is “functional silos [that] make connecting customer data difficult,” cited by 52%. Presumably, these are areas which could benefit from better alignment with the IT department.

Taken together, the results suggest that marketers need to prioritize their relationships with IT departments in order to gather and analyze the enterprise-wide data necessary to create truly customer-centric organizations. The lack of current alignment between the departments probably explains why only 29% of the marketers surveyed feel that their organizations are well prepared to exploit opportunities presented by achieving a customer-centric culture.

About the Data: The results are derived from an online audit of 237 senior marketers, conducted during the third quarter of 2012 and first quarter of 2013. 40% of respondents come from companies with more than $500 million in revenues, and 56% are headquartered in the US.

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