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IT Best Practices: Aligning IT, Marketing & Line of Business Operations

There is no question about it. Marketing, big data and IT are joining forces in 2014, and roles, ownership, and responsibilities are crossing functional lines this year. ~Here are some recent industry stats that illustrate this trend:

  • 9 of the top 10 highest paying IT salaries are for languages, databases, and skills related to big data (Source: Dice).
  • 25% of large global organizations will have appointed a chief data officer (CDO) by the end of the year (Source: Gartner). CDOs tend to be more on the marketing and sales side, thus CIOs are less likely to fill these new roles.
  • As marketing success is powered by technology, more chief marketing officers (CMOs) are striving to emerge as the key IT decision makers & influencers by 2015 (Source: Gartner)
  • More than a third of all IT projects are now collaborative ventures, handled at all stages~by multiple parties~in an organization (Source: Forrester)

Businessman at his desk using a digital tablet

As marketing, big data, and IT come together, having a healthy IT-marketing relationship is vital for your success.~ In fact, Website monitoring plans and marketing plans should be 100% aligned. Therefore, if you don’t periodically meet with your Line of Business, analytics, and marketing counterparts, you should, and pronto! Here are some quick discussion points to help you foster or jump-start cross-functional dialog and collaboration:

1)~~~~~ Key Web functions and critical transactions to monitor on a 24x7x365 basis. Start by analyzing marketing analytic reports to recognize top paths followed in your Website. In addition, plan to monitor upcoming new application code, and jointly identify crucial Web transactions that drive revenue or enable your business operations (e.g. marketing registration forms, shopping carts, Salesforce record retrieval, HR functions, etc.). They should be all monitored on a 24x7x365 basis via a SaaS proactive Web performance monitoring service, such as Site24x7.

2)~~~~~ Worldwide monitoring locations. ~You need to monitor your Website performance from global monitoring nodes (countries and locations), closer to where your customers are coming from. Get this information from your marketing analytics reports, and configure your Web monitoring from corresponding Site24x7 monitoring nodes.

3)~~~~~ Upcoming marketing campaigns. Nothing worse than directing more visitors to a Website that crashes or underperforms at peak times, and benefits your competitors instead. Therefore, test and validate your Web performance before launching your next marketing campaign. Similarly, if new regions will be targeted, plan to add additional Site24x7 monitoring nodes closer to your targeted customers.

4)~~ Alerting and reporting. Define types of problems that would trigger an alert (such as response time violations, content accuracy failures, SLA violations, etc.), and who should be notified. ~Don’t forget to discuss how to handle 3rd-party component breaches outside IT control, and add your marketing peers to your alerting policies and workflows. As big data initiatives shape up this year, this is a great time to identify which Web performance metrics (collected by Site24x7) should be part of your business analytic initiatives. Even if you are not moving forward with big data yet, take the time to configure custom Site24x7 ~reports with the Web performance metrics that are critical to your marketing and business peers, and automatically configure cross-functional email distribution.

5)~~~~~ SEO/Web performance optimization plans. Since Web speed impacts both search rankings and user experience and conversion rates, your competitors are working hard to optimize their speed, and so should you. Therefore, plan to monitor and benchmark all critical Web pages, and compare your performance with industry peers and competitors over time. With that information in hand, you can setup realistic Web performance optimization goals. In addition, don’t forget to monitor all SEO-content hubs built to raise organic traffic, so add all SEO pages to your Site24x7 monitoring plans.

And, one last pointer!

Marketing/IT/business analytics alignment is not a one-time activity, it’s an ongoing one. At least once or twice per quarter, you should get together with all stakeholders and peers to review your Web performance metrics, and reevaluate and adjust your monitoring plans.

Good luck with your cross-functional meetings!

 

 

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