The New Technology Department: Marketing

Within enterprises, technology decision making has been democratized. Every department participates. The “consumerization of IT” put smartphone and tablet decisions in the hands of every employee, and the cloud handed over the keys to the IT kingdom to the line of business manager. Just a year ago, Gartner predicted that by 2017, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will outspend CIOs on IT. 

Marketing is now a technology department. With increased usage of Big Data, the rise of Big Marketing, and more dynamic and interactive relationships with customers, marketers increasingly expect to be part of the technology decision-making process, if they don’t already own the budget.

This should not come as a surprise. Technology innovations are at the center of most modern marketing programs. This has been true since publishing went digital, and since the first marketer was asked to partner with IT to build their company’s first website. Macro trends such as mobile and social computing are simply accelerating the evolution of marketing.

Yet a recent survey from ITSMA and VisionEdge showed that many marketers aren’t fully engaged in technology decision making yet.

• 59 percent don't specify marketing technology
• 45 percent don't recommend marketing technology
• 46 percent don't select marketing technology
• And 15 percent don’t play any significant role in the purchase of marketing technology

Over the next five years, this will change. We agree with Gartner that by 2017 CMOs will own a bigger part of the IT budget. It is inevitable. The future of marketing is wrapped in technology – analytics, Big Data, cloud computing, mobile commerce, and the explosion of social channels.  Marketers that can drive technology decisions and effectively wear the IT hat will thrive, just the way they thrived when the storefront first moved onto the web.