Delaware North's CMO Merry wants an IT organization that's open to new analytics initiatives and can partner with marketing to manage such cutting edge projects. But marketing and IT don't always agree. "Like any good partnership any differences end in a negotiation -- but an informed negotiation," says CIO Quinlivan. If marketing wants real-time access to their customer data and models Quinlivan doesn't say no. He might explain that going from near real-time to real-time doubles the cost of the infrastructure. The CMO may counter and explain the business cost of the one-minute lag in data. "This dynamic tension is healthy and productive as long as information is shared," Quinlivan says.
Biogen Idec's Meyers has invested in IT professionals who see themselves as part of the marketing team. "We need to be speaking the same language and mutually guided by the same compass," he says. "Too often, the geeks in IT like to talk about Markov chains, feature vectorization and edge-nodes on graphs. Marketing simply wants to know in a straightforward way whether or not competitors are having any impact influencing our customers, or how patients in social media are perceiving a new product. We do our best to apply the computing, mathematics and our contextual understanding of the business to answer these questions in the most straightforward way possible." Still there are times when IT might think marketing is off base. But, says Meyers, "it's almost always because a request is showing up as a solution which isn't the right solution. If you decompose the request, it's usually grounded in a legitimate problem that's worth solving together."
This story, "The CIO and CMO perspective on big data" was originally published by CIO.