conference oct15 final

Getting IT to work for Marketing

Andrew Buckley Doctoral Student, The University of Manchester

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Getting IT to work for marketing: Exploring collaboration between marketing and IT functions for the delivery of marketing innovation - Andrew Buckley, Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice Vol. 16 No. 4

http://www.theidm.com/resources/journal/papers/getting-it-to-work-for-marketing-exploring-collaboration-between-marketing-and-it-functions-for-the-delivery-of-marketing-innovation-andrew-buckley-journal-of-direct-data-and-digital-marketing-practice-vol-16-no-4/

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Problem Statement - many new product or service innovations struggle, as the enabling IT developments are late, over budget or don't meet expectations. And a major contributory factor is the collaboration difficulties between the functional islands or thought worlds of IT and Marketing. This research consistently found IT delivery challenges and collaboration difficulties.

The academic research provides a great insight into the collaboration difficulties, caused by Interpretive Barriers between functions. The main one found in this research, is the translation barrier between Marketing “greek” and IT “geek”. Others include interpretation or process barriers. 3

The academic literature also identifies Mitigation Tactics, such as a boundary staff who have the role of translators, with IT-Marketing or Jeckyl-Hyde skills. Others found in this research include training or service prototypes as boundary objects. 4

Car Concepts The use of in manufacturing of prototypes is very common,

to facilitate collaboration between design and production functions. JLR is investing in major new design facility in UK.

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Public Office LinkedIn in California has offices with space for the public to

try out setting up profiles, which gives the chance for Engineering (what they call IT) and Marketing to together see

how end users respond to product designs. 6

User Stories MasterCard uses Service Prototypes, or what’s called in

Agile “Epic Stories”, as a boundary spanning object to facilitate collaboration between product marketing and IT 7

Conclusion & Conjecture

• The answer to the problem of collaboration between IT & Marketing, to enable successful delivery of IT enabled service product innovations is not clear.

• However, the conjecture from this research, is that training staff (T-Shaped skills) to understand the other function’s work, using Agile development (iteration over documentation) and bringing IT & Marketing into the same room, to debate user stories using service design methods; maybe and just maybe, the silver bullet.