As the use of digital and social marketing grows, businesses find themselves under increasing pressure to develop new demand generation models and platforms, many of which are now based on social and mobile media.  Paradoxically, Enterprise IT is expected to enthusiastically support these strategies while also being asked to govern, and sometimes limit, their firm’s internal use of the very same marketing and social platforms and tools that are becoming the backbone of their marketing organization’s strategy.

Historically, marketing has been dependent on IT for many of its database, email marketing and web hosting needs.  The relationship has often been awkward and competitive both culturally and strategically.  The internal competition is at an all time high with many marketing organizations preferring to use outsourced technology enabled business services (TEBS in areas such as database, web site design, search engine optimization, mass email delivery, and analytics).  Experience tells us that enterprise IT’s relationship with marketing is significantly weaker than with other major parts of the firm such as finance, administration, supply chain and production.  Marketing is viewed as ‘loose cannons’ with little accountability, while IT is viewed as the culture of ‘NO!’ and uncertainty avoidance. 

This report will assess the degree to which IT and marketing organizations (and their respective cultures) can and should work together in database, digital and social media marketing.  It will identify the emerging skill sets that combine specific IT expertise with the complex conversational and social architectures that are becoming the foundation for global marketing strategies.  Special attention will be paid to the critical area of education and training in terms of managing and developing the talent pool (internal or outsourced) required for fast-paced marketing technologies and performance based database models, many of which are yet to be defined in what we have previously termed a Data rEvolution.

Read Frank Cutitta's latest blog post on this topic entitled, Preparing for the Co-evolution of Marketing and IT, here.