Dion Hinchcliffe talks about the growing shift of tech dollars to the CMO, and even more shrinking of the CIO’s role.
Several reactions:
a) Marketing is only the latest buying center to come to the attention of tech market watchers. Few people seem to acknowledge the CMO has long used TV audience monitoring, POS data, search engine optimization, email campaign and other technologies. Often without much IT support. With social analytics, mobile advertising and bigger consumer and product data sets, the marketing technology is more prominent, but it’s certainly not a brand new technology buying center.
b) For a long time, way before Nicholas Carr, people have been screaming “end of IT” as various C level execs bought their own technology and hired their own specialists. At Gartner, I saw supply chain execs turn more to their 3PLs, customer care execs turn to external call centers, HR to external benefits administration firms. In research for my last book, I found just about every company building tech skills in their product engineering groups, as they make products “smarter” with sensors, software and satellite support.
c) The CIO and IT staff portion have been shrinking even within the IT budget. Only 10-20% of IT and telecom budgets are spent on internal staff. So while the CIO and IT are the continued “punching bag'” for everyone, they really should be picking on the vendors which make up the bulk of the budget and move slowly on productivity, innovation and other traits expected of IT
d) Most CIOs I know do not like the current IT status quo, and some are pretty vocal about it. Filippo Passerini, CIO of P&G laments in the latest issue of Information Week about the “hub and spoke” software vendor model. ” The software vendor pitches what it’s selling and what’s possible with technology, then a would-be customer tells the vendor what it really needs. FedEx, Boeing, BP, Disney, Goldman Sachs, GE — they all go through the same exercise as P&G, one on one with the vendor”. Randy Mott, CIO of GM is bringing thousands of outsourced IT staff back on to its payroll. Many CIOs around the world are using Google Fiber benchmarks in Kansas City in their own telecom budget review.
During last night’s Oscars, Samsung ran several Tim Burton inspired commercials which featured unicorns. A few of the spots had stereotypical IT staff talking BYOD and other standards. My reaction – that right there is the unicorn. A mythical character everyone loves to portray as a gatekeeper.
The CIO and IT have long been morphing. And hearing greatly exaggerated rumors of their demise.
