While many teams within your organization contribute to your success, one that cannot be overlooked or understated is the relationship with your information technology group.
At our firm, SAS marketing, we’ve learned to embrace the information technology team as our partner. Redefining our relationship in terms of accountability to each other was crucial. IT needs to rely on the business to define a direction and establish clear objectives. Marketing needs to rely on IT for technology, integration and implementation expertise.
Here are some best practices we’ve developed:
— Focus on a common goal. Because we now rely heavily on analytics to do our work, we need expert help on how to create and collect customer data while ensuring its integrity. Without clean data we can’t market very well, no matter how sophisticated our tools. On our marketing team we simply didn’t have the expertise to operate those systems.
— Collaborate on a digital road map. IT has become more focused on external customers, which means it is more strategic. Berni Mobley, SAS senior vice president of IT, saw the partnership as a chance to engage her team more in business objectives and to help define jointly what value looks like from both a business and a technology perspective.
— Create bridges. Mobley created a new integration analyst position to make sure that at the outset of any marketing project our needs would be met using technologies that align seamlessly with the company’s infrastructure. Now the relationship is complementary. Like marketing, IT is often seen as a cost center rather than a revenue center. But through our partnership, we’ve been able to share the story of how we both contribute value.
— Drive toward a single view of the data. At SAS, we’ve evolved a marketing analytics portal that’s connected to all systems and to a single view of the data. Building that portal and empowering people with data and analysis is a critical component to delivering results, and ultimately to maintaining your credibility. But we couldn’t have done it without IT support.
