Process Business Management – Love or Hate IT and Sales?
How Process Business Management Can Help Your IT And Sales
Is process business management for you?
The love-hate relationship between marketing and IT! Where does it lead?
Marketing turns products into sales. Sales and Marketing own the customer relationship. In that respect, it is the profit center.
Information Technology (IT), came into being when the finance department implemented computer technology.
In many companies today IT still falls under the guidance of the CFO. It is part of process business management.
Desktop publishing replaced the typewriters and email took over communications.
Marketing really didn’t rely on IT for much in the way of application support until social media and the Internet changed the way customers communicate and shop.
At that point, Internet bandwidth, computing power, data storage requirements, and creative production applications became critical to marketing.
Enter Apple computers, firewalls, gigabit networks, storage area networks, and broadband communications, and all of a sudden IT and Marketing find themselves in a “co-dependent” relationship!
Psychology Today: The following questions can serve as a guide to determine if your relationship involves codependency:
1. Does your sense of purpose involve making extreme sacrifices to satisfy your partner’s needs?
2. Is it difficult to say no when your partner makes demands on your time and energy?
3. Do you cover your partner’s problems with drugs, alcohol, or the law?
4. Do you constantly worry about others’ opinions of you?
5. Do you feel trapped in your relationship?
6. Do you keep quiet to avoid arguments?
The articles published by CIO review over the past five years keep returning to the dysfunctional relationship between IT and “the business”.
The term “rouge technology” was coined to describe the applications and hardware that marketing independently adopts to meet their needs without consultation or the approval of IT. Bad process business management.
The business adopts mobile and IT is responsible for the collateral damage of related security and malware issues. Over time, IT assumes the role of security enforcement.
Don’t ask don’t tell becomes prevalent as a marketing department strategy for adopting SaaS services that don’t require IT involvement.
More recently businesses have been asking why they need a CIO.
CIO Review, 2017 The Role of CIO in the Cloud First World. https://cloud.cioreview.com/cioviewpoint/the-role-of-cio-in-the-cloudfirst-world-nid-18301-cid-17.html
InfoWorld: 1-2016 The CIO’s days may be numbered. https://www.infoworld.com/article/3019974/cio-role/the-need-for-the-cio-may-be-coming-to-an-end.html
Is this just a wild hair idea or something more? For the answer, one need only look at what is happening in many start-ups. Speed to market at low cost is every start-ups priority.
The Internet is their IT network. Mobile devices and laptops are the predominant user interface. Shared services like color printers, copiers, conference rooms, can all be outsourced.
Microsoft Office 365 and Adobe’s Experience platform provide access to the common applications, and SaaS services abound to support a broad spectrum of more specialized requirements.
As these companies grow, they will evolve in ways that keep them agile. Some absolutely need a technology service to maintain their in-house systems, and many will choose to retain a dedicated team while others will turn to service providers. Unless the business adopts the philosophy that their technology is a large part of how they define their competitive advantage, the IT department as it has evolved will outlive its value. For those businesses who define themselves by their technology, the marketing department will combine forces with IT.
Marketing never goes away, but the services that support how the business brings products to market will keep evolving. With process business management, the CIO has a choice, join forces with marketing, or stay under the cost center of finance as the director of IT and stay out of marketing’s way. It is about improving your project and business process management.