How to Tell If IT and Markerting Have a Good Relationship

1. IT and marketing jointly fund projects. According to research by Frank Cutitta, CEO of the Center for Global Branding and Research Associate, CSC Leading Edge Forum, marketing technology projects go most smoothly when the funding comes from both departments. “When both had budgetary skin in the game, there was an acceleration factor in implementation and higher success rates,” he says. “So key process indicators related to time-to-market and [staying] on-budget for new initiatives were positively affected.”

2. Vendor costs are down. When CIOs and CMOs collaborate, they report significant savings from reducing duplicate expenses and from getting greater leverage with existing vendors, Cutitta says. “As more of these legacy vendors add social media solutions to their existing portfolios, this leverage will become more important.”

3. Marketing efforts are coordinated across multiple channels. Many vendors can assist marketing with, say, a social media campaign. But to coordinate a message across multiple customer-facing venues is something only IT can do, Cutitta says. “If a marketing campaign is only executed in one channel–say the website but not the call center–that’s a bad sign.”

4. Better products get introduced more quickly. “If you create an environment where IT and marketing can form a partnership, you’re going to see faster time-to-market for new products,” says John Murray, CIO at Genworth Financial Wealth Management. “And the products will more fully exploit their technological capabilities.”

For more on CIO-CMO relationships, see “6 Ways CIOs Can Make Peace with CMOs.”