Get off your soapbox! The marketing trends that challenge IT
Marketing and IT should be intimate friends, often they’re barely fleeting acquaintances. As a marketer, working in a business enabling the digital applications of the digital world, I see both sides, and they are now, and are becoming more intertwined and interdependent.
Lost in translation
Following Gartner’s oft-quoted concept that the CMO will overtake the CIO as a procurer of technology, marketers and technologists haven’t always managed to meet in the middle. Sure, not every marketer is a beard touting, pipe smoking creative, nor is every IT professional an unflinchingly empirical engineer. But the inertia in their respective fields of work is not easily bridged.
In essence, we’re in a situation where marketers demand the latest tech, but don’t fully understand the implications of its use. Similarly IT is being mandated to enable a type of business to which it has no direct exposure. It sounds simple but it’s not, especially so when both functions tend to communicate in different languages.
Wake from the nightmare
I’m never totally comfortable with the term ‘shadow IT.’ On the one hand it rightly implies something that’s not in the completely in the corporate mainstream. But on the other, it’s arisen from technology companies offering services to lines of business such as marketing that speak their language. And those teams have bought the solutions, that speak in their language, so they can get the job done. So why does enterprise IT still resist this wave of change in the way that ‘non-techies’ use tech?
In our latest ebook, we explore the marketing trends that challenge IT. The traditional enterprise technologist can look to the likes of Salesforce, a pioneer in delivering a ‘language of business’ approach to IT solutions. They can work with colleagues in marketing roadmap the lifecycle of a campaign,prioritise areas of support and risk to define suitable SLAs. Let me put it this way: there are so many smart and effective tech solutions out there that if you’re not creating a real dialogue with lines of business such as marketing and HR, someone will be.
There is a way forward that doesn’t necessitate shadow IT, and nor does it close doors to doing better business. If our ebook triggers some additional questions or challenges you face, tell us about them, maybe we can help.
Interested to read more? Download the ebook below!
