The criticality of CMO-CIO alignment

This year, chief marketing officers (CMOs) will spend more money on IT than chief information officers (CIOs). This rapid shift in responsibility is creating a growing divide between CIOs and CMOs over firms' IT investment decisions and actions, which is of increasing significance to firm performance. Understanding and managing this CIO-CMO divide is important in light of the magnitude of investment involved-global IT spending is estimated to exceed $4.1 trillion by 2018-and CEOs' belief that technology is a critical success factor for future firm performance. Heretofore, there has been little investigation regarding the unique relationship between the CMO and CIO. The research reported herein addresses this shortcoming by revealing the results of in-depth interviews with CMOs and CIOs across multiple industries. The results identify the nature and sources of conflict between the two roles as well as the management-related mechanisms to overcome them, revealing the need for CEOs to focus on managing four specific sources of CMO-CIO conflict: perspective, goals, accountability, and structural conflict. While the CEO has the power to create the management-related mechanisms that promote greater CMO-CIO alignment, we also detail steps that the functional leaders can take to put the mechanisms in place should the CEO fail to do so.