CMOs are focused on achieving results quickly with new messages, advertisements, and connections based on affinity groups, micro-segmentation, and even personalized to an individual. We often see contrasting interests between the CMO's use of external-services and the challenges IT deals with in relation to security and reliability of data.
CIOs and CTOs can extend the value of social software to enterprise services by:
Providing Service Level Agreements (SLA) with standard operating procedures to govern and manage the new services
Integrating data sources and Software-as-a-Service applications provided online
Integrating cloud services and data sources
Establishing new techniques that ensure the quality and availability of structured and unstructured data
CMOs are increasing their SaaS social software and cloud-based service budgets and expecting the rapid delivery of business results to increase the market penetration across channels and improve the customer touch-points.
The availability of social software is increasing and implementations within the organizations are creating one-off uses that quickly become "islands-of-solutions" which are difficult to manage and integrate. As IT professionals, CIO's and CTOs have voiced concerns that the unbridled use of SaaS and cloud-based services adds to the complexity, duplicates cost, and reduces reliability. How can the CMO collaborate with the CIO and CTO to build flexible but cost-effective solutions quickly?
Effective partnerships between the CMO, CIO, and CTO help accomplish the following:
Manage complexities: Agree upon the standards for governance to manage the SLAs, data quality, and the integration to the software services and data within the enterprise applications' ecosystem.
Reduce duplication of cost: Source, select, and manage the marketing technology providers together.
Integrate new processes: Use the cross-functional teams led by marketing to set the strategy, and evaluate and choose a partner.
Promote organizational adoption: Include marketing in the implementation leadership and in the management of applications.
Provide new data sources quickly: Create secure data exchanges that analyze Big Data to identify trends and customize marketing events.
Improve quality and reliability of services: Manage the SaaS and Cloud vendors with sufficient oversight of the SLA agreements to maintain the quality, consistency, and reliability of the services.
Challenges and opportunities of enabling social applications and enterprise data services
The promise of no installation and no IT involvement is precisely where the CIO and CTO can help the CMO avoid the pitfalls of implementing multiple one-off applications that do not scale to meet enterprise needs. One-off applications like social listening analytics are wonderful testing areas; however, the lack of governance, integration, and management standards creates:
Islands of solutions lack integration
Islands of analytics
Difficult to share business insights and performance Inconsistencies in reporting across the organization
Matthew is an expert in the information technology domain, particularly on enterprise application services. He is passionate about researching and writing articles regarding a wide range of topics in the information technology sector. Watch out for articles on software engineering and services.
Use and distribution of this article is subject to our Publisher Guidelineswhereby the original author's information and copyright must be included.
