After years of talking about collaboration, CIOs and CMOs still aren't doing it.
We’ve heard about it, read about it and in my case written about it over and over: CIOs and CMOs need to work together and respect each other. And they’re forging a new level of relationship. So it was really disheartening to read the results of an Accenture survey of more than 250 CIOs and more than 400 CMOs showing that the two camps are as far apart as ever.
In this instance it seems that IT is the bespectacled girl dating the varsity team captain: technology execs care much more about this relationship working out than marketing execs do. While 77 percent of the CIOs surveyed said there was a need for alignment between marketing and IT, only 56 percent of CMOs agreed.
It gets worse as the two groups progress through the survey, which comes to sound like a heated debate between their disciplines. For instance, 49 percent of CIOs complain that marketing brings in technology without concern for prevailing IT standards. But marketers may think that’s how it should be — 45 percent want their department to control data and content. Nearly half of CMOs don’t think IT understands their requirements, while 40 percent of CIOs think that the problem is standards that change too often.
What’s going on here? My colleague, Frank Cutitta, has a simple though depressing explanation. Goodwill between marketing and IT is cosmetic only, with little real collaboration going on below the surface and plenty of distrust remaining. If true, that’s bad news for IT as marketing comes to control more and more IT spend.
What do you think? Is CIO/CMO collaboration more than skin deep at most companies?
