We’re all like the geek who is consumed by technology but doesn’t own a computer.

Let me explain. In this year’s ITSMA Services Marketing Budgets and Benchmarks Survey, you said that online marketing is the fastest-growing category of spending in your marketing budget this year (79% of you plan to spend more in 2008), yet only 36% of you have a marketing automation system to track marketing programs and results.

This adds up to a dramatic difference between the way you use technology externally with customers and internally in your own operations. This is not a sustainable gap. The good news is that 63% of you say that spending on marketing automation will increase this year—with total spending increasing from 3.1% to 4.2% of your services marketing budget in 2008.

Lots of Data, No Insight

In the meantime, online marketing is generating tons of data, and many of you don’t have automated means of converting it into knowledge and insight. Indeed, there seem to be no plans to change the situation. For example, “Advancing data mining and customer analytics” ranked last on your list of priorities for 2008.

This isn’t just bad for marketing; it’s bad for marketing’s reputation inside the company. In my research into this subject over the past six months, one theme has emerged over and over: Marketing is the least automated major function in the corporation.

While other functions have been automating—and more important, integrating—their operations since the mid-1990s, marketing has been mostly on the outside looking in. Indeed, when it comes to technology, marketing is one of those messy best-of-breed environments that your company might make millions fixing. Talk about the shoemaker’s children.

Automation Equals Accountability

It’s no accident that marketing struggles to prove its ROI. With automation comes accountability and efficiency—the ability to assemble hard numbers and data. Not only does marketing lack this ability, but it trails most other functions that are trying to do the same thing. No wonder that marketing struggles to get the respect of top management in many companies.

But before you get defensive, don’t think I’m blaming you for all this—at least not entirely. Software providers don’t offer an integrated marketing platform that does it all. IT and the business leadership play a role here, too. My sense is that many marketing groups do not have a strategy for IT, in part because leadership changes and reorganizations within marketing are common. I also suspect that IT does not pay as much attention to marketing as it does to the rest of the business. Indeed, I wonder if marketing even controls its own budget in most of your companies.

This month we have a survey out to the membership that will address all these issues and more. I hope you will join us for the September 9 Online Briefing, where we will address the future of marketing automation and offer some best practices for addressing the marketing automation challenge.

In the meantime, please tell me about the state of marketing automation in your company and the challenges you face.