What’s the State of the Marketing-IT Relationship?

November 30, 2020

Infosys Marketing IT Digital Collaboration Opportunities Nov2020Human experience and digital transformation are top opportunities for digital collaboration between marketing and IT teams, but the majority of marketing and IT professionals would not describe their common goals as ‘agile,’ according to a recent report [download page] from Infosys. Here’s a roundup of the report’s insights into how these teams are currently working together.

Collaboration is Possible

The senior-level marketing and IT executives surveyed indicate that there are plenty of opportunities for collaboration between marketing and IT teams. Asked to rate twelve areas based on this potential, it was human experience that the most respondents (35%) placed within their top 5.

Other top opportunities for collaboration were rated by only slightly fewer respondents – these included digital transformation across the company (34%), remote teams (33%) and digital transformation across marketing and IT teams (32%).

Around 3 in 10 respondents see agile marketing-IT meetings (29%), communicating with stakeholders (29%), and ESG (28%) as top-5 opportunities for digital collaboration. At the other end of the scale, fewer respondents rate content personalization (18%), urgent issues (15%) or long-term projects (11%) in their top 5.

Top Challenges

Unfortunately, despite their ideas of what digital collaboration could look like between marketing and IT teams, various challenges are currently standing in the way. Again asked to rate their top 5, collaboration across teams was cited as a top challenge by 44% of respondents. Respondents also indicate that experimenting quickly (41%), managing change (40%), and agility (37%) are among their biggest challenges, with slightly fewer pointing to problems with evolving CX to HX (29%), a company culture that avoids risk (29%) and budgets (27%).

It appears that such challenges are preventing alignment of goals when it comes to marketing and IT functions. Only a minority of respondents describe various functions as ‘aligned’, these including a strengthened loyalty program (30%) and growth-oriented goals unlocking technology’s potential (29%).

Even fewer describe the acquisition, integration and use of technology (28%) and proposal and development of a human experience roadmap (28%) as being aligned between marketing and IT.

In fact, all 28 categories measured received consistent alignment ratings between 23% and 32%, highlighting the work to be done on improving collaboration between these teams. This is on top of the siloes and alignment challenges impacting marketing and sales teams, according to other research.

Where Are the Gaps in Perception?

Not only do these challenges exist, but the perception of their impact differs between marketing and IT teams. For marketing respondents, evolving CX to HX is a greater challenge than it is for IT respondents (58% vs. 35% respectively), as is agility (69% vs. 46%) and collaboration (77% vs. 62%).

On the other hand, for IT respondents, budgets are a far greater barrier to collaboration than for marketing, cited by more than twice the proportion of respondents (58% vs. 27%). The data indicates that IT teams are also more concerned about a company culture that avoids risk (58% vs. 35%).

Read the full report here.

About the Data: Findings are based on a survey of 220 Marketing (42% share) and IT (58%) leaders, all of whom are from companies with at least $500 million in revenues. The survey was fielded in April 2020.

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