• by Jack Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_research, December 23, 2016

According to new research published this week by ClickZ Intelligence, Marketing and IT functions need to work together more closely. A survey of both senior marketing and IT professionals has revealed that there are significant differences between these two core business functions in their perception of organizational priorities and the quality of digital infrastructure.

The ability to harness ‘big data’ has become a pressing concern for IT departments as their colleagues in marketing departments seek to ensure they can take advantage of both structured and unstructured data and ensure the requisite speeds for real-time optimization of targeting, messaging and pricing.

The Backbone of Digital report has also found that, compared to their colleagues in marketing, IT professionals have a much rosier view of the customer experience their companies are delivering across digital channels.

According to the research, 88% of IT respondents describe their company’s infrastructure as ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘good’, compared to only 61% of marketing-focused respondents, a massive difference of 27 percentage points, says the report.

Both marketers and IT professionals felt that the best engagement and experience is delivered across desktop, cited as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’ by 71% and 93% of these groups respectively, but trailed by other channels including mobile website, mobile app, desktop display, mobile display, social and push messaging.

It is evident, says the report, that those working in IT have a much more optimistic view of how well they are delivering across the full gamut of digital channels compared to their IT counterparts. Marketers (generally), are much more likely to be aware of deficiencies impacting customer experience which can adversely affect business performance and brand reputation

Just 19% of marketers strongly agree with the statement “marketing and IT work closely together to ensure the best possible delivery of product/service”, and only 11% strongly agreed that they “have a clear governance framework to ensure that CIOs/CTOs and CMOs work together effectively”, says the report, suggesting a lack of alignment around marketing and IT business objectives.

This compares to 45% of IT professionals who strongly agreed that “marketing and IT work closely together… “ and a similar percentage (46%) who strongly agreed that they “have a clear governance framework… “

The report suggests that business objectives need to be much better aligned to ensure closer harmony across these core business functions.  If a framework to facilitate this is not put in place at the top of the organization, it becomes exponentially more difficult to implement lower down.

Marketers, says the report, are increasingly aware that the proliferation of data sources at their disposal is only of use to their businesses if they can analyze that information at high speed and transform it into relevant intelligence for any given site visitor.

Mike Plimsoll, Product and Industry Marketing Director at Adobe, says “… a couple of years ago… marketing… at our biggest clients… expected that data… processed within 24 hours… was fine… now the expectation is that data is processed instantly… so that all of a sudden ‘real-time’ really does mean ‘real-time’…”

The ability to harness ‘big data’ has become a pressing concern for IT departments as their colleagues in marketing departments seek to ensure they can take advantage of both structured and unstructured data and ensure the requisite speeds for real-time optimization of targeting, messaging and pricing, concludes the report.

More than half of IT respondents said that the ability to manage and optimize for big data was currently a ‘very relevant’ topic for their organization, in addition to those who said it was ‘quite relevant’.

To access the free complete report (The Backbone of Digital) from ClickZ please visit here…