Michele Fisher, Director, Business Strategy – WW Retail and Consumer Goods (Microsoft) Linkedin
Ben Treasure, Global Partner Development Manager for the Adobe Partnership (Microsoft) Linkedin
Today, the art of weaving together disparate datasets is more than a technical task—it’s the heart of the compelling marketing strategies that both CIOs and CMOs are on the hook to deliver.
These roles know they must be partners if they want to drive revenue. But they haven’t always worked seamlessly together, and often, data and departmental siloes block their progress and frustrate both teams.
The cornerstone of a successful CIO-CMO partnership, then, is a joint data strategy, fueled by AI-enabled technology that makes data actionable and accessible to both groups. By being curious about how their roles intertwine, leaders can fine-tune their shared vision and use technology to bring it to life—helping them create a cohesive work environment that benefits teams, customers, and the wider business.
Here’s a look at how the right technology can help facilitate a culture shift within an organization to bring CIOs and CMOs closer together, empowering them to simplify tasks for their teams—and contribute to personalized customer experiences that drive ROI.
While each is an expert in their area, effective collaboration begins with a cross-pollination of skills, where CIOs appreciate marketing dynamics, and CMOs embrace tech nuances. By being curious about what the other does, and embracing each other’s priorities, both functions can more effectively align toward the same goals and tactics to reach them.
Both CIOs and CMOs are responsible for delivering ROI—and working together doubles their power to influence it. By collaborating to track, monitor, and respond to evolving customer demands, CIOs and CMOs can continually adjust their joint data strategy to build customer experiences that yield the best possible business outcomes.
It’s no wonder that 93% of CIOs say that partnering with the CMO promotes innovation.1 When they work from a joint vision and data strategy, CIOs and CMOs can unify their areas of expertise to illuminate opportunities they might not have seen on their own. Shared ownership of strategy, data, KPIs, solutions, and platforms results in new insights that can help businesses stay one step ahead of changing customer preferences.
1 Adobe. Shared responsibility: Unlocking the CIO and CMO Partnership. 2021. Accessed February 9th, 2024.
A modernized data estate is crucial to successful CIO-CMO collaboration—and the way it’s structured can help leaders drive more value from data. The most effective infrastructure integrates two capabilities: data governance, overseen by the CIO, and data activation, a CMO’s homestead. Data governance ensures that the insights marketers infuse into customer journeys are high-quality, compliant, and effective.
Adobe and Microsoft integrated solutions, for example, are designed to work this way. Microsoft Fabric provides essential data that powers activation through Adobe experience solutions, acting as a foundational layer that enables AI to extract meaningful, predictive insights and generate a comprehensive customer picture through a solution like Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform.
Here’s what that looks like in action, and why it matters for the CIO-CMO partnership:
When marketing uses Adobe Journey Optimizer to launch an interaction into market, they can subsequently use Adobe Customer Journey Analytics to evaluate its performance. Then, they can use Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform to refine the segment and craft a more specific message. Finally, the new message is released into the market via Adobe Journey Optimizer again, in what’s called a “virtuous cycle.” While experience technology brings these insights to life, Microsoft Fabric operates in the background, accelerating aggregation and improving access to data.
A modernized data estate empowers marketers and other non-technical users to independently access data, create reports, and generate visualizations using natural language. The ability to access important insights about keywords, segments, channels, and content helps them enact new marketing activations faster and more precisely to meet customers in the moments that matter.
Because non-technical users can self-service data, IT spends less time on support, focusing instead on critical tasks like uptime, security, and business-critical requests from finance and operations. What’s more, unifying data via Microsoft OneLake within the Microsoft Fabric helps CIOs transition focus from primarily implementation to the high-value, business-critical work they signed on to do.
Modernized digital infrastructures can now integrate AI technology, benefiting both CIOs and CMOs. Through AI, teams can automate tasks and workflows, quickly analyze large volumes of data, make recommendations for better personalization, optimize customer journeys, and much more. In fact, generative AI has such an impact on output that McKinsey estimates it could increase productivity by 10%-60% a year through 2040.2
Modern technology seamlessly combines operational data with customer signal data, creating richer insights across previously disparate sources. With access to both more and better actionable insights, CIOs and CMOs can effortlessly contribute to actionable views of customers, empowering teams to drive better targeting—and, therefore, stronger ROI.
2 McKinsey. The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier. June 14, 2023. Accessed February 9th, 2024.
The CIO-CMO partnership is only as strong as the digital foundation that enables it. Without the right technology in place, leaders can’t get the data they need, and their shared vision crumbles—to the detriment of customer experiences and their potential ROI. If organizations want to deliver customized journeys that build loyalty, they must invest in an infrastructure that ignites CIO-CMO collaboration, empowering them to do what they do best: generate both customer loyalty and revenue.
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