Rachael Pignotti

I find this true with my company as well. Our marketing department and IT have learned to work more closely together over the years for the same common goals. IT is specifically helpful with things like marketing our mobile app to emails. I think it’s a necessary collaboration for most companies staying on top of digital trends/marketing.

I currently work for a company that is still relatively divided on the departmental front. Marketing works closely with sales, but the IT side is pretty isolated from those discussions. In your experience what are a few ways to bridge that gap between the multiple departments? How did the transformation begin at your place of employment?

Outstanding; I agree with that synopsis! Having worked in IT (pretty much all of my life), I find this divide especially present in my current role. It is only through our attempts at agile transformation and inviting stakeholders to the table to help groom tickets, am I seeing a shift. Great discussions and creating clear understanding across the project team really seems to be making a difference. Especially with the Agile framework where we should see iterative bits of code rather than the big bang at the end. This ensures, not only on the front-end, but at regularly intervals in the process, we continue alignment with what is requested and what will be delivered.

Companies are finally realizing that IT and Marketing can only go so far without working together. They’re bridging the divide and combining both in order to keep up with the trends and needs of consumers. This is a huge leap for the industry and I do believe that other companies who don’t get on board will fall behind. IT can bring an insight that Marketing may not know of or notice and vice versa. Through collaboration and well rounded product that’s relevant can be presented to consumers and keep up with demands.

I work in higher education and this industry has a LONG way to go in terms of true collaboration between marketing and IT (apologies @Temple! #GoOwls). I’m somewhat new to the industry, having worked in corporate for 15 years prior to joining the University, but it seems that we lose sight of the user/customer, or in our case, the student. We literally get tied up in red tape throughout every stage of innovation, so it’s very hard to bring positive disruption to the mix. We don’t look at the personas of our students to develop a customized positive experience and it’s frustrating for those who are inspired to bring us all together.

Apologies for the soapbox moment, clearly this topic is one that constipates my brain.

I think that the companies that realize the need for both teams to work together are the companies that are quickly moving forward and staying on top of trends in digital development. My company does not yet see the great deal of benefit in the two working together. I find that there are accesses that we need as the marketing team that IT does not quite understand until some sort of situation arises we don’t necessarily recieve them. Just like Sara, at my company, we too get tied up in ” red tape” and have to wait to say “I told you so” and use that situation to leverage a couple more steps towards advancements.