Over at GigaOm today, the excellent Barb Darrow (@GigaBarb) put out a very interesting article on the changing role of IT pruchasing, especially in the age of consumerization and cloud. We had a chat on Twitter and email and she thought it was worth quoting me! *blush*. Here is the Readers Digest version:
On Tuesday, the Gartner projection that in five years, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO, cropped up several times at Salesforce.com’s Dreamforce show … those mentions prompted an impromptu Twitter poll about whether it’s a good idea to have CMOs buying IT. The results were mixed.
“I see many CMOs using cloud-based services for marketing automation, response analytics, reputation management, content management, social media marketing and even application development,” said Andi Mann, a former analyst who is now VP of strategic solutions for CA.
…
As Mann points out:
Bottom line – for most orgs, marketing is just another business unit, and like all business units it is spending its own budget in part on directly acquiring technology. Just like finance, production, executive, operations, and others are. Gartner and IDC numbers both show technology spending outpacing IT departmental budgets, so that ‘extra’ technology budget must be going somewhere. I think it is going into ‘rogue IT’ spend by these business units — marketing included.
And that thought should give everyone pause.
Read the whole thing at Do you really want your CMO in charge of IT? — Cloud Computing News.