Marketing & IT: Between Love and Hate in the Time of SaaS & Cloud Technologies

Many of the inter-departmental feuds start because different departments within a company function at different velocities. Moreover, pressures from aggressive, executive goals also tend to vary wildly across an organization. This all means that it should come as no surprise the amount of finger-pointing prevalent throughout businesses, despite the fact that everyone should all be working for bigger, common goals.

Being a marketer, my attention has been drawn to tensions between marketing and IT for some time. These two players are often at the core of many conversations here, on CIO, and many other such forums. Here’s my modest plea for why the relationship between the two absolutely needs to be revisited from an operational perspective, especially in the era of SaaS and Cloud technologies.

Marketing is Undergoing a Tremendous Cultural and Business Shift

Marketing in general is experiencing this shift, but B2B marketing is perhaps an extreme case. With more funds moving to the online space, businesses are curious to see the fulfillment of the interactive promise: real-time data & performance metrics. This means that the marketing department now functions under the imperative of demonstrating real-time value through smarter analytics, automatic processes that nurture leads/visitors, integrations with sales initiatives/activities, and alignment to business KPIs. Traditional marketing departments that focused on brand communications, brand awareness, PR, and otherwise churning out collateral, are ill-equipped to tackle any single one of these needs, not to mention all of the above. So what do these marketing departments do?

Typical Solution: Bypass IT (and Why It’s Fraught with Problems)

The evolution of SaaS and Cloud offerings have made it possible for marketing departments (and other parts of the organization as well) to solve their own pain point quickly, and in the present tense. For departments that have an expectation of higher velocity-to-action, this has been a great win. I’m also a huge proponent of SaaS and Cloud technologies as a highly convenient way to get things done, to have your data accessible for other applications, and for performing quick implementations that bypass IT departments.

But here’s where the trouble begins:

Bypassing IT = Avoiding the Problem.

It’s this short-term thinking that can easily end up costing the business a lot more in the long-term. And still, every time a department makes a technology decision without consulting with a technical adviser of the business, there is risk:

• risk in data security,
• risk in how/if the various existing systems will exchange data with the new system,
• and risk in duplicating efforts across departments.

To put it simply, if I was working in IT right now, I would be scared at how many systems have been purchased & implemented without my knowledge or close investigation. More so, if I was an executive in any medium-large size company, I’d start asking a lot more questions about the type of partners we’ve chosen and how they might affect the organization’s reputation from both a brand and risk management standpoint.

Better Solution: Marketing & IT Both Need to Become Stewards of the Business

“Bypassing IT” has become a top benefit and selling point for most SaaS & Cloud offerings. As a marketer, I know that the line works, so why not use it. But my common sense says that from a business stewardship perspective, technology B2B marketers are doing SaaS and Cloud a huge disservice by focusing on bypassing IT as a main benefit of the offering.

Much like the traditional marketing department won’t cut it in today’s interactive world, the existing IT department is at risk of becoming a dinosaur, whose tasks will be mainly to work the hardware and place working computers with MS Office on employee desks. Technology infrastructure needs will be dispersed throughout various departments, which will only lead to inefficiencies.

So what’s the alternative? It’s time for B2B marketers to demand and help shape a different IT business partner. And it’s time for the business to look at how IT can be developed in a way that it has the bandwidth to think ahead and anticipate infrastructure needs. Without this vital collaboration, marketing will always be seen as a rogue force in the organization, forcing the hand of IT and bypassing them, instead of working together with IT to best serve the business.

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About the B2Bblogger: Rodica Buzescu (@rodica) is amarketing manager at Amazon Web Services. She enjoys combining interdisciplinary knowledge and various agency & B2B experience in digital marketing to solve larger marketing challenges. Rodica sometimes blogs on various marketing, management, and bigger strategy ideas at http://morphingthrough.blogspot.com.

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