The Relationship between the CIO & CMO?

CIO.com has an article titled “CMOs and CIOs: Can This Relationship Be Saved?” where they discuss surveys results released by the CMO Council and Accenture.

The CIO and the CMO are two of the most important positions in today’s organizations and should be working extremely closely…but these survey results show that to not be the case at all.

Some highlights from the survey are below with a few choice words added as commentary from me.

More than half (58 percent) of IT executives said they were championing, spearheading or shaping the digital agenda at their company, whereas fewer than one-fifth (19 percent) of the marketers said that the digital agendas at their companies were being shaped by IT executives. Instead, 69 percent of marketers said they were the ones in the driver’s seat.

Wow.

Lots to say here…but I’m only going to say this:  If there’s this much disconnect between the CIO and CMO, organizations are screwed.

Another:

• 30 percent of IT Execs noted that they “lack the time and technical resources to help marketing”
• 39 percent of them said that “marketing bypasses them and works directly with the vendor”
• 31 percent said “marketers hinder progress by taking control and isolating IT from solution selection, strategy or implementation.”

Pretty interesting results from the report. I’ll be digging into them in more detail in the coming days.

One piece of the article that caught my attention…even above and beyond the quotes above was this paragraph towards the end of the article:

From the CIO’s point of view, then, it’s better to be proactive with the marketing organization than reactive. The CMO Council-Accenture survey demonstrates that today’s CMO is unafraid to do an end-run around IT if necessary.

Emphasis mine.

Ok.  I agree…but what bothers me is this –  The takeaway for CIO’s reading this article is that they are supposed to be proactive when it comes to marketing?

Is that something new?  And..is it JUST with the marketing organization?

Really??

Have we become so backwards in the world of IT that we have to be told to be proactive in helping other groups within our own organization?

One last question:

Where’s the CEO in this mess?  Why is there such a disconnect between CIO’s and CMO’s?  Can anyone say ‘leadership problem’?

How do we fix this?    Look for more thoughts on this later this week.