CIO vs. CMO = left brain vs. right brain?
EXECUTIVE CIRCLE SUMMIT Many executives accepted the invitation to the "Executive Circle Summit" at the Dolder Grand last week. Not really surprising, as top-class speakers were announced. The keynote of the Group CIO of a large Swiss pharmaceutical company presented itself exciting and topical: "The Alignment of CMO and CIO - Roles, Changes, Perspectives." In the interaction between CMO [...]
When it comes to the interaction between CMO and CIO, the brain comparison falls short.FROM CHRISTOPH OGGENFUSS*When it comes to the quality of cooperation between CIOs and CMOs, the image of the brain hemispheres is a natural choice. This then sounds as follows: the "left-brained", analytical, (unimaginative) CIO and the "right-brained", creative, chaotic, unconventional, (unstructured) CMO. So much for the common clichés.Functions of CIO and CMO moved closer togetherIn his remarks, the Group CIO of a large Swiss pharmaceutical company strongly countered this massively truncated view of the CIO and CMO functions. In his opinion, at least the poles of the two roles have moved closer together, or rather both CIO and CMO have opened up in recent years and developed their understanding of the "partner discipline". He explained this impressively with some concrete examples from the global Novartis daily routine.My personal observation during the last few years leads me to the conclusion that the IT community has become more involved with marketing than vice versa. I would like to leave the reasons for this open for the moment - I personally have not been able to find a conclusive explanation.Functions marketing and informatics convergeIt is obvious that this convergence is not due to altruistic reasons, but to market trends and market forces. Taking the terms social, mobile, cloud and big data as examples, it is clear that the functions of marketing and IT are continuing to converge, i.e., are coming closer together. This movement began about 20 years ago with the topic of CRM and has continued to intensify.Rob James sees the cooperation between CIO and CMO not only as a necessity, but also as a real opportunity. After all, there are complementary, mutually reinforcing skills that are beneficial for both sides. One example is the project management expertise of IT, which can be very welcome in complex marketing projects. On the other hand, when it comes to selling project ideas internally, the CIO can take advantage of the CMO's expertise.Amazonization" as a phenomenonThe fields of marketing and IT are often divided by technical terms such as "conversion optimization" here and "application architecture" there. Now, however, these divides are filling up by themselves, as if by an invisible hand. In the new world, people are thinking much more in terms of business models, and implementation then calls for customer analytics, social collaboration or omnichannel customer dialog, for example.These and other terms cannot be mechanistically assigned to the CIO or the CMO - and that's a good thing. In this new world, the CIO and CMO sit at the same table and solve tasks together. If this image feels futuristic, then I recommend rubbing your eyes and entering reality.I wouldn't be surprised if Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon had put the CMO and the CIO in the same office... Amazon's success provides the conclusive answer.
