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Friday | 5 December, 2008
CIO
Why CIOs and CMOs Need Each Other
Every time you see significant dysfunction in the way a company or brand interacts with its customers, it is not the fault of one corporate function but two — both marketing and technology
Jeffrey Rayport 07 March, 2006 13:01:51

This is not a problem that CIOs can solve without CMOs, or that CMOs can solve without CIOs. It's time for the two to act together. Yet, in most corporations, they don't. And that's when customers jump ship, stock values slump, and corporate reputations are battered.

The strategic dialogue between CIO and CMO must begin with consensus as to the desired customer experience and brand. Often these conversations are best guided by an outside facilitator with objective hearing and broad industry context. This probing can highlight impediments of the company's organizational structure and governance, management incentives, and enterprise economics. Together, the CIO and CMO must know the customer perspective on these issues:

• Have we deployed the right touch points (human and technology) in the right places in the right ways - and do we have too many or too few?

• Have we optimized each of our touch points according to customers' preferences and needs, by customer segment and usage occasion?

• Have we understood the processes or pathways our customers select to interact with our company in each and every purchase or re-purchase cycle?

• Have we aligned and integrated those touch points (along with the people, processes and systems that enable them) into consistent and coordinated expressions of brand and offerings to deliver coherent customer experiences?

The orchestration of the presentation layer cannot be left to chance. It calls for expert practitioners of marketing and technology, who know what their customers want in order to create the interfaces and measurements to guide their organizations to delivering on these expectations and preferences. CIOs and CMOs who together lead and integrate their workforces in innovative ways will reinvent how brands are defined, how services are delivered, and how companies will compete. Marketing and IT must come together, and the CIO-CMO teams who can pull it off will each hold the keys to their company's competitive future.

Jeffrey Rayport is co-founder and chairman of Marketspace LLC, a strategic advisory, executive development, and software unit of Monitor Group. He is co-author of Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers

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