Making Agile Innovation Work For Both Marketing And IT. They look to data to improve the customer experience and drive growth. This article—the third in a six-part series on agile marketing with a panel of experts—covers how IT and marketing can collaborate better, leveraging each other’s skill sets to use data to market at the speed of the customer. But this extends further, to our experience managing technology and software in general. In other cases, the tools are becoming so robust that many of the data tasks are becoming more app- and tool-based, allowing the marketer to run queries without having to know SQL. Whitler: Do you think most IT departments are well positioned to support agile marketing? Every company that I’ve engaged with is different so it’s hard to make generalizations here, but my sense is that the IT departments that are most set up for success are those that take a dev-ops approach, have embraced agile and are focused on being an enabler for the business. Verone: No, I don't believe they’re set up to support marketing. But using generic tools to add value for marketing is extremely hard. That’s why marketing functions ignored those tools in the past, and are choosing marketing-specific data management and analytics solutions today.
The tools that support the analysis of marketing data often falls within the responsibility of the CIO. But many IT teams haven’t dealt with marketing data before. The fact that it’s uniquely messy, diffuse and complex makes it hard for them to develop timely, cost-effective solutions. What’s more, IT usually isn’t conversant in marketing (nor marketing in technology), so the marketing team has to devote resources to help IT understand how the data relates to the business.
Similarly, it’s rare that someone becomes a marketer solely because they love data. Usually, they’re passionate about telling impactful stories and developing strategies for helping improve consumers’ lives. They look to data to improve the customer experience and drive growth.
This article—the third in a six-part series on agile marketing with a panel of experts—covers how IT and marketing can collaborate better, leveraging each other’s skill sets to use data to market at the speed of the customer. For more insight, see Part 1 (here) and Part 2 (here).
| The team of experts: | |
| Jennifer Zeszut | CEO, Beckon |
| Jim Ewel | President of Peel the Layers and publisher of the Agile Marketing.Net blog |
| Mark Verone | VP, Global IFE Operations & Automation, Gogo |
| Roland Smart | VP of Social & Community Marketing, Oracle & Author of The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage |
| Scott Brinker | Co-founder & CTO of ion interactive; Editor of chiefmartec.com; Program Chair of MarTech, Author of Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative |
Whitler: Do you think marketers are ready to tackle the data side of agile marketing?
Smart: In general, I don’t think marketers have sufficient experience with data and the language that surrounds it. But this extends further, to our experience managing technology and software in general. That said, as a profession, marketing is becoming increasingly technical, and there’s been an influx of technical professionals from product management, development and data science teams into the marketing organization. Our ability to learn from them and to leverage their experience will be critical to our success and the modernization of our profession.
Verone: I think the role of marketing is evolving, especially in digitally focused companies. Marketers are now driving the bus when it…
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