Translating the rhetoric of “customer-first” into meaningful action and overcoming legacy attitudes remains hugely challenging for traditionally-structured companies.

The sales & marketing technology world has rapidly become complex as the number of applications and categories covered by Scott Brinker’s increasingly dense Martech ‘supergraphic’ illustrates. This graphic, which has almost become a mandatory slide at marketing conference presentations, tracked 150 tools back in 2011. This year, 2017, it featured 5000. Few, if any marketers, can credibly claim to be fully across this landscape.

Traditional IT organizations are also challenged. IT people who have built their careers around coding and building stuff are being threatened by marketers who go around them and buy tools directly from tech vendors that business administrators and business super users can configure and drive with minimal IT involvement.

However, marketers who do buy their own tools without IT’s collaboration often find themselves stuck with point solutions that cannot be easily integrated and extended into their companies’ broader ecosystems, something which is essential if superior 360-degree experiences are to be delivered to customers.

Marketing and IT has to get into bed together and collaborate effectively. And we have to drop the phrase ‘digital marketing’. All marketing and sales activity today is digitally enabled. We don’t need a “digital strategy” today. We need strategies to succeed in the digital world that is all around us, where meaningful, sustainable and profitable differentiation can be achieved only by an obsessive focus on the digitally-enabled customer experience, with digitally-literate marketers and business technology (not old-school IT) specialists collaborating together around a shared vision and purpose.

Business Technology fluent?

Do you understand how best to engage at the intersection of BT, business processes and people?

If the answer is “no”, you may need to lift your game and extended your horizon.

Just as financial literacy is a “must” for any senior executive, today BT literacy is also at the top of the “must have” list.

Do you appreciate that almost all the disruptive new technology advances have occurred in the consumer space in recent years (think Apple, of course, and Google, Facebook and Amazon)?

Digital services are being consumed in radically different ways, on new and increasingly mobile devices.

The old, locked-down, risk adverse, complex corporate technology world is less and less relevant to future business success.

The leaders in the development of new generation business technology, such as Salesforce.com (the world’s most innovative company according to Forbes magazine for two consecutive years now, 2011 and 2012), Sugar CRM, Yammer and Workday, cite the consumer world as their inspiration with phrases such as “voluntary adoption is the new KPI”.

So, do you understand the term “multi-tenant architecture”? The significance of HTML 5? And the acronym API (Application Programing Interface) and what why it is important?

Of course, you don’t have to know how to code web pages in HTML 5, but you must have a sound, high-level understanding of the Internet-native technology backbone that should be driving your customer-driven business and enabling a differentiated  brand experience.

It is no longer good enough to effectively abdicate technology decisions to your CIO and the IT department, whilst complaining at the same time about the absence of value.

In fact, why does your company still have a CIO?

Over the next five years, the executive role of the CIO will be diminished. The position will be eliminated at many companies, as BT-literate CFOs, COOs and CMOs asert their ascendancy by taking the lead in driving technology change that improves both the customer experience and profitability.

Forrester Research’s founder George Colony sums up the direction in this quote:

“Old IT was about uptime (and risk management). BT is about: agility, speed, speed, being bullet-proof, customer-centricity, and business-centricity.”

Forrester no longer has a CIO. Today they have a Chief Business Technology Officer (CBTO).

George says that while the actual title change is a small one, the symbolism is significant.

He has compelling views on the topic, which he articulates here and here.

As do other good thinkers such as Scott Brinker with his marketing technology blog and Advertising Age article.

“CMOs Will Spend More on IT Than CIOs”