Gartner predicts that by 2017 the average IT budget of a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) will be larger than a CIO’s budget. Yawn, another crazy prediction that’s counterintuitive and focuses too much on IT spend without taking into account the bigger picture. I suppose we should actually just merge the CIO and CMO into one role and give that person responsibility for both….shouldn’t we ? But hang on, here’s another half-baked suggestion. What if the CMO rather than swallow the IT budget became Operationally responsible as well ?

Not such a mad idea as you might think. In my recent article Social vs Social I suggested that there needs to be closer alliances and input from Marketing into business process design, that understanding the marketing, media and engagement models of the social ecosystem and transposing those across business processes will actually help improve process design from a social viewpoint. So what does this have to do with cows ?

MOO is the new Marketing Operating Officer you’ll be hiring by 2017. The emergence of social media input into the operations world may create a different type of skillset, once which understands both business operations and marketing and using the amalgamated knowledge of both worlds create the social enterprise experience completely end to end, from internal to external.

  • Marketing’s reliance on technology has increased steadily over the years.
  • The breadth and diversity of enabling technologies and delivery platforms became far greater for marketing than for any other business function.
  • The Internet has changed the rules about how companies connect with customers as evidenced by the growth of inbound marketing at the expense of outbound. Consumers are empowered like never before; and companies need to engage them through an unprecedented variety of channels. The platforms where those channels live change constantly, especially in the mobile space. Keeping up is a huge challenge.
  • Metrics rule the roost. Subjective assessments haven’t gone away, but they are now the black sheep in the family of marketing skills. Marketers need a lot of computerized tools to measure things, store results and generate actionable conclusions. Compare any CMO’s current accountabilities to those of his/her counterpart from 15 years ago. You’ll be amazed.
  • More automation solutions and tools are delivered as services over the Internet

The pure focus on IT budget is an excuse to ignore the real business issues being faced as a company tries to transition from being an inward navel gazing entity to a full-on engagement powerhouse. Yes, the technology aspect cannot be ignored and that the Internet and how we engage using new platforms and automated solutions is changing the Marketing role and control of the budget but you can’t escape the fact that the only people crazy enough to take an organisation on that journey will be the ones who know the shop floor and the content creation facets of the business with the understanding of how to merge the two together.

The analysts are only giving you half the picture but they they were always a bit mad anyway.