Marketing wrestling control of technology purchases from IT departments, claims survey
Marketing leaders, rather than IT, are in almost complete control of their technology purchases in a trend being heralded as a major step forward for CMOs, according to a new study.
Research firm Telsyte spoke to 255 senior marketers with 91 per cent claiming they have the final say over the technology systems they buy.
Such purchasing decisions have historically been made by IT leaders, Telsyte said.
More than half those surveyed also said they have their own IT budgets as marketing departments are given greater responsibility within their organisations.
But the empowerment of marketing has not gone down well with IT, with 36 per cent saying their companies have “experienced problems” with integration, inconsistent purchases and security.
Telsyte senior analyst Steven Noble said the results illustrate the changing role of the marketer who is now the “custodian of big data and insights”.
“Marketing’s transformation has moved on from just buying digital advertising to building scalable approaches that provide a single view of the customer, support meaningful measurement, and enable real-time decision-making,” he said.
Web analytics or split testing software is the most common purchase, with four out of 10 marketers buying such technology, with 38 per cent buying CRM systems.
“Marketing measurement and customer-centricity are the left and right legs of digital transformation,” Noble said. “This is why Web analytics and CRM are the types of applications marketers are mostly likely to buy.”
Almost half the marketers (45 per cent) said they are taking greater control because they believe they know more about their needs than IT.
As an IT guy I’m OK with that so long as marketing are also responsible for the TCO of those decisions. For example, supposing a certain purchase increases new customers buying the company’s product in any given quarter, that’s a good thing, right? Well, not if it destroys the supply-chain and after-sales support. In that case, the company will wear knock-on costs from compensating actions or failures in operations, logistics, and ultimately customer experience. Total cost per unit will grow and customers will leave the brand. Marketing generally don’t own the entire lifecycle of the customer and that is why corporate business functions like IT exist; to balance the concerns of the whole business to maximise ROI on tech investment. If marketing people can be grown-ups, there’s no problem. IF.
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Having a person overseeing the digital framework of a business is a smart move.
In a major corporate an allocated person per dept could meet with their counterparts to ensure that everyone understands short and long term goals. The same ownership of tech in marketing is happening in HR, recruitment, (enter further dept’s here). A person sitting above this ‘team’ is not a bad idea either. (CTO?)
There is nothing worse than a bullish team member pushing for a new piece of kit that does not integrate with the overall business and costs the business dollars (as IT Guy states), down the track. At the same time it is the bullish, go getters who are often the adopters and the driving force to make changes happen.
It is hard, however appointing tech / analytical leads, in all departments to meet once a month is a start.
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If you are an engineering company, you generally have a build it and they will come philosophy. If you are a business company, then the business will drive the IT hardware you buy or make. If marketing start doing the IT purchasing, I can see a lot off issues in the engineering company starting to show up. So it really does depend on your company.
Another point is that marketing might buy point solutions for a specific product. And point solutions have their own issues which the IT department knows all too well. Lets hope they both talk to each other.
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