Despite clear recognition of the business need, most IT and marketing organizations are still a long way off from true collaboration, according to a new Forrester study conducted jointly with Forbes, surveying 300-plus marketing and IT leaders. “It’s clear the CMO and CIO haven’t reached power couple status quite yet,” writes Vice President and Principal Analyst Sheryl Pattek in a new blog post examining the study findings. “In order to thrive in the age of the customer, CMOs and CIOs must collectively turn their attention to defining a marketing technology strategy that supports the business and delivers the goods — the ability to create a single view of the customer that produces actionable insights and consistent customer experiences.”

Survey findings include:

  • Misalignment in communication of strategic priorities. One of the largest gaps between IT and marketing responses was around the ability of the two organizations to communicate each other’s priorities. Some 68% of IT leaders believe they can communicate marketing’s strategic priorities, while just 49% of marketers share this sentiment toward IT.
  • Joint ownership of marketing technology projects. CIOs and CMOs are beginning to see alignment on marketing technology projects, with 70% of IT and more than half of marketing agreeing that “marketing and IT have shared ownership/responsibility for marketing technology projects.”
  • Producing actionable insights based on customer intelligence. CMOs and CIOs have their work cut out for them to establish an acceptable level of customer insights to drive business growth. The disparity of agreement between marketing (42%) and IT (57%) respondents on this topic demonstrated one of the largest gaps in the survey.

For additional information on the study findings, visit Forrester’s blog for CMOs here.