CMOs to Spend More on IT than CIOs

Bangalore: In many of the business organizations today, big data is a much talked about terminology. Surprisingly, it is seen that it is not only the IT department that is after big data, however, the marketing department which is forever eager to discover various trends from the mammoth amount of data they have accrued  is leading the race to adopt technologies related to big data, according to Gil Press on Forbes.  

A survey by Gartner last year, predicted that by 2017, the Chief Marketing Officer will spend than the Chief Information Officer when it comes to IT.

With Gartner having made the prediction, we can now easily say that the business will dictate the CIO on what needs to be done with regards to big data this year. This trend will not be easy to CIOs especially with CMOs being part of a world which is packed with social as well as web data. According to Gartner’s Jennifer Beck, the different planets have caused damage to the relationship between the CIO and the CMO and both are to be blamed for this difference. “One got demoted as a planet and the other is the butt of jokes. Both parties are to blame for the current state of affairs.”

Marketing departments in various business organizations will be focusing more on big data in 2013. This implies that they would either put pressure on the IT department to meet their goal or rely on cloud – based resources. A survey by Infogroup targeting Solutions and Yesmail Interactive on 700 marketers revealed that about 70 per cent companies are planning to increase their expenditure on data – related marketing initiatives while more than half of the companies will be adding manpower this year to take care of their data efforts.

However, in another survey by Neolane on more than 250 marketers revealed that 50 percent of the surveyed marketers feel that their organization is not well equipped to handle the ever increasing amount of data and they are uncertain if their company can handle the challenges of big data. With regards to the new rules and regulations of marketing data governance, 81 percent of the surveyed marketers feel that they are not fully prepared.

Results of another survey reveals that the increase in data mining is because of the people they mine. According to the Exact Target’s Marketers from Mars study, 33 percent of the surveyed consumers want more investments by marketers in email. While 24 percent are looking forward to see investments in the brand’s website ans 22 percent look for a better facebook experience.

A recent survey by Infochimp on over 300 IT departments about what the IT team wants the CIO to know about big data found that the most significant challenge when working with Big Data is accessing the data siloed in various business applications across the organization (76%). In addition, inaccurate scope was listed as a top reason why IT projects in general fail (58%). Respondents also identified other top challenges related to their Big Data projects such as staff education and understanding the platforms, lack of data context and inability to connect the dots (indicating a data analysis talent gap), processing, analyzing and on-going management of the data.