[ Disclaimer: I reserve the right to be wrong]

Here is a Story of CMO-CIO dis Connect that outlines a 'Partnership'... A Partnership that has a Digital Obligation, Brings a Unique Technological Glue and is mandated to Envision a Journey of Collaborative Success and Growth.

This article is an outcome of my personal experiences and a few references.

Every business has either gone digital or is in the process of getting there—and this is no exaggeration. Technology, tightly coupled with data and business processes, has become the key to sustainable competitive advantage. It plays a major role in steering business growth, profitability and market differentiation. For every new-age organization, it is not only imperative but also obvious that the offices of the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) office and the CIO (Chief Information Officer) collaborate more closely. As a result, the CIO becomes strategic partner in not only executing marketing strategy but also scaling the marketing landscape.

Why the CMO and CIO should chose to collaborate ‘differently’ – than ever before?

CMO and CIO offices have been contributing to the organization’s growth under their respective scope. However, leadership in both the offices have started feeling a ‘need’ to start collaborating ‘differently’. Why? There is a disruption. This disruption has led these two formidable forces to make the choice of collaborating ‘differently’—more than ever before. The disruption was an outcome of the two key business goals—creating sustainable growth while maintaining a competitive advantage.

This disruption conspicuously and continuously affirms one point - some times, targeting the CMO office. And it is that the ‘technology’ and the formation of ‘a digital enterprise’, now, are extremely critical for the sustainable growth and competitive advantage. Nevertheless, a CMO sees a crucial need—the need for a strategic partner. And there seems to be no better function to strategically align and partner with, other than the CIO’s office. Both the offices are required to agree that this strategic partnership must be wider, deeper and ‘different’ this time. The reasons for this unprecedented need for newer ways of partnership between the CMO and the CIO are deeply rooted in their respective priorities and objectives:

The CMO needs urgency in implementation and adaptation of sales and marketing technologies:

For the sake of an example, a CMO envisions a modern CRM platform for highly efficient sales and marketing teams and effective collaboration between them. This platform should deliver customer insights, improve productivity and act as a comprehensiveness platform to measure sales and marketing performance—among others. All these are vital demands and are to be fulfilled without any further delay. There is a tremendous pressure to be quick in implementation, roll-outs and iterative development. It is now important to follow the ‘test: run: revise’ model that ensures right implementation, effectiveness, adoption, security, performance, robustness and scalability of the platforms.

Organizations have an imperative to plan IT investments in the front office and digital technologies:

The marketing strategy is supposed to allow more spending on front-office and digital technologies such as CRM, next generation collaboration platform, analytics, intelligence and mobility.

On the other hand, every organization also wants to have a tight control on the cost and margin – which, further exerts pressure to optimize operational cost.

This is a trade-off that is hard to undertake in isolation.

Silos at various levels frequently hold back innovation and unified experience, which is key to business imperatives:

There is clearly a need for seamless integration at various levels—functions, processes, systems and data. All departments, and obviously the CMO office, need an integrated view of customers/employees and the CIO’s office is in a much better position to enable this. The CIO office has that technological and process-centric glue that could address this challenge like no other function – considering their interfacing with all departments, uniformly.

Sales and marketing technologies are expected to be a ‘best-fit’ in all respects:

While the CMO has better understanding of the business requirements of the platforms driving business growth and improved sales and marketing productivity, the CIO has the answers to key questions such as: Whether the platform will be a good-fit technically? What are the complexities in implementation? Can the platform integrate seamlessly with the existing enterprise architecture? Is the platform robust, scalable, stress-tested and maintainable?

Change management, adoption, compliance, governance and support were too big to handle in isolation:

A platform for any marketing or sales process—whether in the implementation phase or post implementation—needs full attention in terms of change management, support and training, in order to ensure that it is well-adopted and is leveraged in its full capacity.

Thus, it is clear that the traditional ways of CMO and CIO collaboration could no longer help achieve the outcome expected by the new-age digital enterprises. This time, it has to be different!

What is that CMO-CIO consortium? How this consortium works together to make it happen?

This unprecedented partnership between the CMO and CIO is destined to give rise to the new CMO-CIO Consortium, which will shape the vibrant future of any large or small enterprise. This consortium should marry their needs and priorities to align with the organizational goal of having an exceptional and sustainable growth while maintaining the competitive advantage.

Consequently, the consortium, are supposed to partner strategically and embark on a transformational journey – a journey that will transform sales and marketing functions – including the way they align with each other. The CMO’s key objectives are, among others:

To deliver a world class and unified experience to customers and employees To further drive digital innovation across processes To measure marketing investments in real-time and effectively manage marketing assets and channels To generate more leads and improve sales/marketing productivity To derive integrated insights and intelligence about market, customers, employees and partners from various disparate systems – external or internal

At the same time, the CIO’s focus is on automation, platforms, cost optimization, integrating systems, security, system support and upgrades, system availability and performance—with a clear objective of driving IT productivity.

Clearly, their focus areas and priorities complement each other, laying a strong foundation for the new partnership and its grand success.

What CMO and CIO offices can do to reach that unprecedented collaboration level? - A few points that can be considered by CMO and CIO offices, who wish to transform their digital initiatives

In this journey of digital transformation, the mandate to have a new age CMO-CIO partnership will be a big realization – sooner or later. Below are a few recommendations that can be considered to make it happen:

The CMO office - or other similar profiles like Chief Digital or Experience Officer - will continue to impact growth and competitive advantage through technological innovation and digitization. The CIO team should be a key enabler to fulfill this demand to achieve growth. The CMO will be continuously evaluating and adopting innovative technology. But, the CMO should not consider the CIO office as ‘just an IT enabler’. They should both align with each other strategically in the early stages of adopting/implementing new technologies. The evaluation phase is always crucial and hence, the CIO should be involved to evaluate the technology/platform from the perspective of integration requirements/complexity, security, architectural fit, performance, scalability and support requirements, among many others. CMO’s spend in sales and marketing technologies seems to be increasing, unprecedentedly. There should be healthy alignment when it comes to investment planning. With cloud, operational cost can be lowered and provide greater control on cost. Keeping budget ownership aside, cost control can be periodic point of discussion CMO’s key internal stakeholder is the sales organization. Moreover, as within a few organizations, the CMO offices or a sub-function acquires the portfolio of sales enablement. Hence, when the CIO partners with CMO, there is direct impact on the sales organization and their productivity There is a need to have a cross-functional collaboration at all levels—right from leadership to the executive level—between the CMO and CIO office. The CMO and CIO offices should respect and value each other’s priorities and concerns. A corollary to this will be that the CMO office become slightly tech-savvy and CIO office understand key business imperatives from a non-technical angle Integration, architectural fit, security, scalability, robustness, high-end performance and high availability are imperatives for both offices, although the CMO-CIO collaboration is more than just this Agile methodology and quick and iterative development is an essential need of the time and is pervasive. On one hand, CMO cannot claim that CIO’s team is not agile and on the other hand, CIO should apply Agile model in not just CMO-facing projects but across functions

3 things organizations can’t afford to ignore:

Every digital enterprise has an imperative for sustainable growth and driving competitive advantage Not going digital can be detrimental to growth CMO-CIO partnership cannot be neglected while dependency on technology is an imperative

Organizations clearly have to strive hard to eradicate the “disconnects” between CMO and CIO. The story of the new CMO-CIO consortium and their strategic partnership will have a direct contribution to its growth trajectory. Organizations should start investing – or, continue investing, if already doing - aggressively to foster this new relationship and make it wider, stronger and ‘different’.

- Shakti