5 Things Every CMO Wants Their CIO to Know By Morag Lucey, CMO, Avaya

5 Things Every CMO Wants Their CIO to Know

Morag Lucey, CMO, Avaya | Wednesday, 02 August 2017, 12:16 IST

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The reality of today’s digital, customer-centric world is clearer than ever, and it is significantly affecting the CIO and CMO. CIOs are now emerging as collaborative business partners with more customer-facing priorities; meanwhile, CMOs must now balance customer engagement with technology and analytics to deliver contextually-rich experiences. Together, these two key players must work in unison to amplify the customer communications experience.

I explored this dynamic further in a recent blog, where it was concluded that CMOs should operate as major influencers of IT spend, with CIOs working alongside them. Now, just one question remains: how? How can CIOs support CMOs to make their best marketing technology investments? How can they empower CMOs to operate at maximum potential each day?

There are seemingly endless ways that marketing can work with IT to reimagine business and customer outcomes, but the right support is needed to make this happen. To this end, here are five things CMOs want CIOs to know to help marketing teams do what they do best:

1. Speed Matters

The world has sped up in a very short amount of time. Consider technologies like web chat, social media and mobile apps: once non-existent for customer service, we now see hundreds of thousands of customers engaging with these platforms every minute. To be competitive, you must move quickly. You must be able to move at the speed of the consumer and flexibly respond to digital change.

Marketing organizations must have the freedom to instantaneously deploy new solutions and test new campaigns to limitlessly innovate and improve. Continuous change is at the heart of marketing; CMOs must be in control of the pace and nature of this change, while CIOs must support them to flexibly do so. Considering the average IT team takes up to six months to develop and deploy a new application, this is a major problem today. The traditional IT development/ deployment cycle must be put to an end.

2. Solutions do not Always Need to be Built

That same research shows that 85 percent of organizations demand faster development and deployment cycles from their IT teams. One way to significantly shorten this cycle is to eliminate the development phase altogether. In other words, solutions and applications do not always need to be internally built. There are many great off-the-shelf applications available that can be instantly cloud-deployed, and marketing needs IT to connect them quickly and securely for immediate use. In this way, CIOs can help CMOs reduce deployment time from months to days.

3. Understand that We Live for the CX

CIOs are notorious for having an internal perspective; meanwhile, CMOs thrive on their ability to look outward at the customer experience. For CMOs to operate at maximum potential, CIOs must understand how marketing is working to create a better experience for external customers.

This means focusing less on why certain actions are being taken and more on how those actions will affect the end customer. Consider Daniel Bergan, Omni-Channel Transformation at Westpac, one of Australia’s most prominent financial institutions. In taking the initiative to better serve the bank’s customers, Daniel and the team created an end-to-end technology environment that transforms parts of the organization from the outside in. Most recently, for instance, the company announced that it would be making banking features available via social media messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter and Snapchat.

Forrester puts it best in a recent report: “CIOs (must) move beyond IT’s traditional focus on technology assets and expand their role as leader of a customer-facing function: responsible for creating superior customer experiences across channels and delivering digital business innovation."

4. We Need the Right Infrastructure and Tools

Marketing teams need to be as productive as possible. They must be able to seamlessly communicate and collaborate, both internally and externally. They need insight into customer data across multiple teams, processes and customer touch points. Our level of efficiency is dependent on whether we have the right infrastructure and tools, supported by the CIO.

Understand that we know you cannot eliminate bandwidth issues entirely, but we would appreciate if you did all you could to make them as minimal as possible. We know you cannot completely eradicate security threats, but we trust you are working overtime to ensure we can work as securely as possible. Just as we work to deliver on the promise of amazing experiences for our customers, we need you to deliver on the promise of this experience for us internally.

5. Be a True Business Partner

What more can I say? Get in the game with us. Dust off your other strategic hats and start wearing them. Start thinking outside of the box to drive the best possible business outcomes and customer experiences. The fact is that, today, the CIO is no longer concerned with simply keeping the network running and phones on. Like it or not, today’s CIO has stepped out of the data center and is actively working alongside key areas of business like marketing, sales, R&D and HR. They are now operating as a revenue-generating entity. They are responsible for driving efficiency across the entire organization.

Today's smart, digital world has assured that marketing and IT will remain interdependent. The good news is that CMOs and CIOs are increasingly seeing eye to eye, reflecting a willingness of both to prioritize the business over individual goals and objectives. As with all things, though, there is room to do better, there are opportunities to deepen collaboration between these two essential players and across IT and Marketing teams. I just outlined five key areas where I believe CMOs and CIOs can achieve the level of intimacy needed to really thrive and succeed.

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