In 13 years of covering IT for CIO magazine, there was a recurring theme: the tribal mistrust between IT and the business. It’s those Mac vs. PC ads writ large—almost postal. IT people are really angry about the way business people treat them like servants, and business people hate how IT people treat them as if they are stupid and helpless.

So when I created our survey on marketing automation this summer, I made sure to ask questions about marketing’s relationship with IT. I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. Nearly 70% of respondents said they have no formal IT strategy. Marketers don’t think it’s their fault, however—67% of respondents blamed the lack of strategy on a lack of support from IT.

Clearly, we have a relationship problem here. When we asked people about their biggest challenge in marketing automation, 70% said money. But everyone always says that. It’s a bit of a red herring. Our belief is that it’s the relationship with IT that’s really getting in the way here. Following closely behind money as the primary challenges were organizational support and change management processes. Who in the organization is supposed to provide support for technology? And who is supposed to develop change management processes for the implementation of technology? I hope you said IT.

Marketing Needs Help

One of the things that intrigued me about the relationship issues I saw between the business and IT when I was at CIO was the currents flowing beneath the sentiments. IT people are like tradespeople, often more loyal to their craft and their peers than to the businesses they serve. This drives businesspeople crazy, partly because they think it leads to poor IT support inside their companies, and partly because businesspeople lack that kind of broader community. The business itself is their community and that’s where their entire loyalty is focused—they are impatient (and maybe a little bit jealous) with those whose loyalty is more broadly focused.

I guess I hoped that marketing’s relationship with IT might be a little better than the broader relationship between IT and the business, because IT and marketing have something very important in common: they are both viewed as support functions by the clueless inside their organizations.

Marketing people can be as downtrodden as IT people can. And empathy is a critically important component of good relationships. If you can’t get inside your significant other’s head and imagine what it was like to hear that snarky comment that a colleague made at the meeting, you have a problem.

But IT and marketing people both know what it’s like to be treated as a servant and it could actually be the key to improving the relationship. You should try sharing some of that misery with them sometime.

I say that in part because having a technology strategy is going to become more and more important to success in marketing because marketing needs more automation—especially as so much of our work begins migrating online. IT decisions have gotten much more complex. Years ago, marketers could get away with approaching their major IT decisions much as consumers do: Discover a need, find a tool, and install it for yourself and perhaps for a few colleagues. But today you need to weigh carefully issues such as scaling the tool to all areas of marketing, data storage and retrieval, and integration. These are not decisions that marketers are equipped to make on their own.

Marketing needs to take steps to fix the relationship with IT. Though IT is the natural target for blame, marketing needs to take a share of it, too. In our survey, we found that only half the marketers had tried to develop a formal liaison relationship with IT (and vice versa). This has to change. If it doesn’t, it’s unlikely that marketing will ever achieve its goals with automation. If you lose the ongoing dialogue with IT below the C level, it’s unlikely that things will go your way at the C level, either.

This is something you can look into and fix today. Do you have someone in your marketing organization who loves IT and is interested in working with IT? You have your spokesperson. It costs you nothing. They can still do their day jobs.

There are many other mechanisms for creating a better dialogue with IT that are more formal, such as steering committees, periodic joint off-sites, collocating IT and marketing people together, and, at the ragged edge of reality, a coup d’état. At one of our member companies, the CMO literally took over the responsibility for IT. As you can guess, there were no issues with the marketing automation budget after that.

So before you start being one of those outlaws who goes around IT when you need software, first pick up the phone and see if you can enlist IT’s help. It will hold up your plans a bit, I know, but it’s becoming ever more critical to success.

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