The article titled, “Getting the CMO and CIO to work as partners,” the authors prescribe the following five pre-requisites for effective partnership between the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and the Chief Information Officer (CIO):
1) Clarity on decision governance: The decision-governance framework clarifies how the CIO and CMO, and potentially other C-level executives as well as their respective leadership teams, must work together and support each other. Teams should be explicit about when decisions are needed, what must be decided, and who is responsible for making them. It requires compromises on all sides to achieve clarity and specificity on roles. The benefits of alignment include accelerated decision making and avoidance of wasted work.
2) Building the right team: The two executives must lead a common agenda for defining, building, and acquiring advanced analytics capabilities. Often this is accomplished by creating centers of excellence that include both marketing and IT people. The accomplish common agenda it is important to map the stages of the big data value chain—from data architecting to delivery of customer offers—and describe the necessary capabilities and responsibilities for each stage. Roles must be assigned to each stage with the understanding that there may need to be multiple roles for a given stage and that they will often require someone from both IT and marketing.
3) Transparency: The CMO and CIO must sit down at the start to define data-use requirements with precision, and then meet regularly—biweekly or monthly—to review progress and keep the effort on track. Scorecard that tracks project progress and identifies breakdowns is an effective mechanism to ensure transparency.
4) Hiring IT and marketing translators: The CMO should hire someone who understands customers and business needs but speaks the language of IT. The CIO needs to hire technical people with a strong grounding in marketing campaigns and the business side.
5) Learning to drive before you fly: The CMO and CIO should focus on a few pilots to test team compositions and new processes for collaboration. This approach allows teams to develop best practices and learn valuable lessons that can then be used to train other teams. One such lesson: don’t be afraid to fail, but keep the projects and teams small enough at first to both fail and learn quickly.
Source: Ariker, M., Harrysson, M., Perry, J. 2014. Getting the CMO and CIO to work as partners. McKinsey & Company, August 2014.