A critical element of building The Brand Called IT is realizing that what in CIO circles may be compelling debate about the public, private and hybrid shades of Cloud deployment, is to the businesses a reason to Cloud implementation within their own organizations.
As a marketing wonk, I’d argue that the businesses (especially marketing) see the Cloud as totally oversimplified commodity that can be purchased on a monthly basis with a credit card. There’s a chorus of “why do we need enterprise IT for what is the equivalent of a Dropbox strategy?” Add to that the red-hot “Marketing Cloud” segment and you’ll find that marketing has hijacked the word to be synonymous with “Suite”.
In my opinion the problem is that the term “cloud strategy” doesn’t necessarily get the respect in the businesses when compared to many of the other these other more sexy social, mobile and analytics aspects of the now-trendy SMAC skills.
I can hear you saying, “but what do they know about security, privacy, hacking, interoperability, reliability and bandwidth?” Maybe nothing, but that hasn’t stopped the disintermediation of enterprise IT when it comes to Cloud deployment.
Click on the link and take a close look at the attached Marketing Technology Landscape chart from chiefmartec.com and try to find reference to The Cloud.
Out of the mind-numbing number of marketing technology categories and vendors depicted, there are two in the bottom-third that I can identify that are labeled as Cloud-specific.
I would argue that this graphic is a Rorschach schematic of the 21st century marketers’ brain. The noise related to social media, data analytics, mobile engagement and listening tools (all elements of the blazing hot Marketing Cloud) is so great it totally overwhelms generic Cloud. This despite the fact that Cloud is the critical underpinning of virtually every other piece.
As counterintuitive as it sounds, CIO’s must ignore the Cloud blocks on the chart and religiously focus on all the others. This would be analogous to finding the beautiful lady instead of the old lady on this other famous eye test.
By reversing their lens CIO’s can move away from the anticipated hue and cry about how IT needs to be involved in Cloud deployment and shift the conversation to how Cloud fits into a specific marketing technology or business tactic.
The messaging needs to include such sound-bytes as “Cloud Based Sales Enablement”; “Cloud-driven Loyalty and Gamification”; Customer Engagement/VoC Cloud Strategies”.
Debating security and efficiency of hybrid, private or public cloud in isolation will only result in marketing and the businesses’ eyes glazing over. Which is typically the root cause of shadow or imbedded IT organizations that can speak the language of cloud in a tactical context.
To twist the famous Drucker quote: “Applied business strategy eats Cloud theory for breakfast”.
How has your IT organization translated your organizations’’ Cloud skills brand into a business strategy context?
