That Peter gets things done as the CIO and is meeting the VP marketing's needs is good news, Spanyi says. The not so good news is the VP marketing often has no idea what Peter is talking about. That is an issue of culture and language. And it is an area where CIOs, while paying lip-service to the notion of talking the language of the business, are still badly falling down, he says.

CIOs should be aligning their IT projects with a list of priorities that are most important to the business, he says.

"As opposed to the IT shop coming up with their own so-called strategy, which may or may not coincide with what's important to the business in a given quarter or half year or year, there should be a more tight linkage between the IT project list and what's important to the business. I don't know how many times I've heard from the people I've interviewed that one of the frustrations they have is that they do an improvement project of some kind and they involve IT and then halfway through the project, people come to them and say: 'We're really sorry, but the technology part of this project didn't make our top 10, so it will be next year'. If I had a buck for every time I heard that I would be a rich man," Spanyi says.

Weigh-In

SIDEBAR: Why CIOs and CMOs Need Each Other

The proliferation of service channels demands that the heads of IT and marketing work together.

By Jeffrey Rayport

We all know the story: You see an item in a chain store catalogue but decide to buy it from the retail store to avoid delivery charges. The retail store assistant, however, cannot find the item and, after consulting the store's product database, tells you it's no longer available. At home you turn on your PC, find the store's Web site, and miraculously locate the product. You order it, but now must wait for delivery. You get the result, but not in the way or the time frame you wanted.

Similarly, you dial your credit card issuer, an automated voice-response system answers, and asks that you enter your card number. You dutifully punch in the 15 digits. After a lengthy wait during which you listen to a repetitive recording about how much the company values your business, a live customer service representative finally comes on the line and asks for your 15-digit account number. You tell her you already entered it. She tells you the system did not forward the information. You get the result, but again, not in the way or the time frame you wanted.

So where does the problem lie? Is this a marketing issue for the CMO or a technology issue for the CIO? Of course the answer is: both.

Indeed, 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. The combination of people and technology deployed across multiple service channels fails to provide the basic services you sought, let alone the worldclass services you expected.

So when will CIOs and CMOs join forces to address these challenges, not from their well-defended functional silos but together? The answer: when both parties take time to fully understand and account for the impact their solutions will have on the consumer.

Slumping Satisfaction, Rising Costs

The pressure is mounting for action. The irony is that companies have gone to heroic lengths and considerable expense to build multiple service channels to meet customers' needs. These range from retail stores to catalogues, Web sites, call centres, interactive voice-response units, handheld PDAs and touchscreen kiosks, to name a few. In response, however, customers have grown increasingly frustrated by the lack of coordination and consistency of experience across these touch points.

Every Web site is, in theory, one part marketing and one part technology; or one part CMO and one part CIO. The breakdown occurs in an uneven execution of IT-enhanced sales and service functions which, upon deeper examination, often reveals unresolved issues between the marketing and IT disciplines.

For example, when Motorola introduced its sexy new camera phone in 2004 (the V710), it stitched glossy bind-in brochures into upscale magazines such as Vanity Fair and The New Yorker to lure readers online to access a special microsite for the handset within Motorola.com. Marketing e-mail campaigns to drive traffic to the same special URL revealed nothing more than a general information page on the company's mobile phone line. A search on the site for the V710 yielded absolutely no results. The new model was actually listed on the site, but not under its retail model number. No one from marketing or IT had configured the site to receive the campaign's traffic - or to mention the new product by name at all.

This is one of an infinite number of examples of the CIO and CMO speaking different languages in the design of the "presentation layer", the interface that makes a software application visually appealing and user-friendly (Windows vs DOS) or accessible to the non-tech-savvy self-taught consumer (World Wide Web or AOL vs BITNET and USENET). Effective corporate presentation layers are the work of a solid partnership between CIO and CMO; the outcome is a customer-friendly gateway that is experientially compelling. Large corporations cannot expect their customers to navigate the arcane backwaters of a corporation's systems and sub-systems, any more than a software maker can expect customers to learn machine language to use its products.

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