Tom Shelman feared the worst. Without consulting him, the marketing department at Northrop Grumman had struck a deal with a client that required Northrop’s engineering department to upgrade its entire IT infrastructure?hardware, software and dozens of desktop workstations. Shelman, Northrop’s CIO, knew that the company’s bid for the job did not begin to cover the cost of those improvements. He also knew that his IT department didn’t have the resources to honor the agreement.

"There was no way the rate could absorb that kind of investment," says Shelman, who still winces at the memory a few years later. "Nor did the company understand the kind of investment that was going to be required. Things like that are a multimillion-dollar investment."

Northrop would have lost serious money on the contract if Shelman had not immediately notified the CFO of the financial bombshell in time for the company to salvage some profit from the deal. This wasn’t the first time marketing had done an end run around the IT department. But this time, Shelman decided he had had enough: From that point on, he insisted on working with his marketing counterparts to make sure that marketing never again made IT promises the company couldn’t keep.

Northrop learned the hard way how to bring its IT and marketing departments together. Throughout much of corporate America, however, marketing and IT departments still work in separate, noncommunicating spheres, with opposing strategies and goals. Gung ho salespeople make deals that IT can’t support. Marketing professionals want sexy new features installed on their companies’ webpages immediately. Companies lose deals because marketing’s glossy image doesn’t always accurately represent IT’s back-end capabilities. And IT professionals don’t always have the communication skills or clout in their company to withstand marketing’s demands.

As technology becomes more and more central to the operation of many companies, it is increasingly imperative that IT and marketing heal this longstanding rift. And don’t expect the other party to do all the work. Understanding what makes your marketing colleagues tick is essential for any CIO.

Polar Opposites

The root of the problem is that CIOs and marketers have strikingly different job mandates and personalities. Marketers think about opportunities: raking in revenue with new accounts, promising new and more exciting services, dreaming up bold new images for the company. CIOs, by contrast, constantly deal with limitations: a nagging lack of IT resources, financial barriers to implementation of new systems, the frequent need to sacrifice exciting new projects in order to keep legacy systems up and running.