How CIOs Should Be Helping Marketers

One of my enduring interests is identifying the low hanging fruit for CIOs and CTOs. CIOs manage the portfolio of technology. CTOs build solutions. I see these two roles as connected, so I refer to them as CITO. I am always on the lookout for ways that a CITOs can use their mastery of complexity to help the rest of the business.

Increasingly, I am finding that if CITOs spend just a bit of time thinking like marketers, taking time to understand the process of marketing, delving into marketing automation technology, and attempting to find sources of data that can be of assistance to marketers, the impact can be tremendous.

Marketing is something that CITOs do not naturally think about. The marketing department has traditionally been one that is the least dependent on IT. Marketers spend their money on events, on creative, on webinars, on campaigns and other efforts that for the most part are executed by third parties that use their own supporting technology.

Trends in marketing, especially the rise in the importance of the Web and Social Media as a channel have started to change this, but the divide remains. In August I wrote about how SaaS-based marketing technologies make it easy for the marketing department to use quite a bit of marketing technology without ever having to talk to a CITO. (See Marketing Technologies Bypass IT.) While it is clearly possible for the CITO to never set foot in the marketing department, the question is: Is it a good idea?

No is the answer. After doing just the slightest amount of digging I was able to find several ways, some quite easy, that the CITO can help marketing do a better job. I'm going to do a deeper dive on this under the umbrella of a problem statement referred to at the end of the article, but here's the first cut of what I found out.

First of all, the data center is a fountain of information that should be directly in the hands of marketing in most companies that have a customer facing web presence. Machine data, which is produced by systems about detailed activity in large volumes, is something that CITOs know a lot about. What CITOs have not yet understood is that machine data can be a powerful window on customer behavior.

Think of a web server log, something that is examined by the data center staff on a regular basis to help diagnose problems. Such data can also provide a real time window on how customers are using a web site. Technologies like Splunk were built to help IT staff search and summarize machine data, but with just a small amount of enhancement web server log data can track in real time the flow of customers through pages, the products that are going into shopping carts, and the rate of transactions. When marketing staff has a direct view of what is happening in a web site, problems can be found and fixed faster. Opportunities to improve the site can be discovered, implemented, and tested faster as well.

As I've talked to more and more vendors and users of marketing automation technology I've come to realize that the divide between IT and marketing that I wrote about in August is only sustainable in smaller organizations. In larger firms, there may be several channels for communicating, interacting, and transacting with customers, each supported by its own technology. The whole idea of implementing a marketing automation technology like Eloqua or Marketo is to be able to track the customer as they interact through any channel, to create a central brain that indicates at which stage of the buying process a customer may be at, and then to use that understanding to send just the right message.

"Each interaction is an opportunity to move a buyer forward, to make them angry, or to waste your money," said Steven Woods, CTO and founder of Eloqua.

CITOs play a crucial role in making sure that each system that interacts with a customer both feeds the central brain and takes advantage of the stored knowledge. From the time a customer starts poking around on a web site and requesting information, through the sale, and then during service and support, many different systems are involved. CITOs should be making offers to marketing about how to collect more information or enhance the customer experience instead of waiting around for someone to ask.

"If we called a company we had just done business with and they acted like they had never heard of us, we would rightly think it is rude," said Mayur Anadkat,  product marketing manager for Genesys contact center solutions at Alcatel-Lucent. "But that's the way customer service systems at most companies work. You call and you start over from scratch." It would be much better if the call center system asked, "Are you calling about your recent purchase or a new issue?" But for this to happen, CITOs must involved to bring information to the central brain and use that the information in each customer interaction.

Steven Woods says that the complexity of figuring all of this out, which he calls the "whiteboarding problem", stands in the way. CITOs are masters of the whiteboarding problem, but they must step up to the plate and design and configure enterprise applications for such support. The marketing department is not going to be in the room for many of these design meetings. It is up to the CITO to represent their interests. If the CITO isn't thinking like a marketer, this will not happen.

Another way CITOs can help is to encourage data collected in marketing to be used in the rest of the company. The analysis of social media data done with technologies like WiseWindow have broad applicability in enhancing the kind of predictive models that are the ideal form of business intelligence, for example. Recently, The Daily Beast used Wise Window to help predict the outcomes of the 2008 elections. Such technology can also be applied to demand forecasts for consumer products or to uncover other early indications of consumer sentiment. The CITO should step up to do the whiteboarding analysis to bring this data to wider attention.

So far we covered three ideas. I'm sure at most companies there are dozens more that energized CITOs could discover. If CITOs go down this road, they will find that Chief Marketing Officers are fellow travelers. Both CITOs and CMOs are nerds. They are masters of their complicated domains, who are expected to deliver results through means the rest of the company does not readily understand. By working together they will be able to work more magic than either side ever thought possible.

Dan Woods is chief technology officer and editor of CITO Research, a firm focused on the needs of CTOs and CIOs. He consults for many of the companies he writes about. For a problem statement that explores relationship of CITOs and CMOs please visit How CITOs Should Help the CMO at

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