IBM announces customer tools to keep the CMO and CIO happy

According to Gartner, by 2017, the CMO will have greater control of the IT budget than the CIO. Marketing budgets will grow 7-8 per cent over the next 12 months, which is 2-3 times that of IT budgets.

The IBM Institute for Business Value talked to more than 1700 CMOs from 64 countries and 19 industries to produce the 2011 CMO study.
The study reveals that 82 per cent of CMOs say they plan to increase their use of social media over the next three to five years but feel that they remain mired in 20th Century approaches.
There has been an explosion of data. Every day we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data and 90 per cent of data has been created in the last two years.
Combine that with data about in-store traffic, conversations with call centers and updates from suppliers. It is a daily deluge of data waiting to be sifted for nuggets of intelligence that marketers can act upon to boost their business.
The convergence of social and mobile is prompting organizations to revisit old websites to create new experiences to better reach and engage with audiences. Web data has evolved to include social media, videos, and web forms, as well as traditional data such as financial, customer and order data, and transactions.
CMOs recognise that there is a critical and permanent shift occurring in the way they engage with their customers. They do question whether their organisations are prepared to manage the change.
Sumit Sawhney, Vice President of marketing for GM India says that CMOs “know they need to respond more quickly and create dialogues instead of one way communication”.
The growing number of smartphones, mobile and tablet devices are also becoming a priority for CMOs. Mobile commerce is expected to reach $31 billion by 2016.
With the growing number of mobile devices, social networks and social media tools on the rise, CMOs struggle to reach their audiences and to provide access to company data on every type of device for a geographically distributed workforce.
At the same time, CIOs are facing a similar struggle within the organization's walls. That same empowered consumer is today's empowered employee striving to meet deadlines and deliver superior results at an even faster pace.
According to IDC, employees typically see up to 30 per cent increased productivity if they use social tools internally to complete their work.
Despite their growing reliance on technology and their soaring budgets, CMOs readily admit they lack the skills that IT requires. According to the IBM CMO Study, while 79 per cent of CMOs expect high levels of complexity in their job over the next five years, only 48 per cent feel prepared to deal with it.
With the pressure on businesses to be profitable, CMOs now feel they need to be able to quantify the value they bring to the business.
63 per cent of CMO’s also believe that ROI on marketing spend will be the most important measure of their success by 2015. However, only 44 per cent feel themselves to be fully prepared to be accountable for ROI.
Social Platforms mean that now everyone can become a publisher, broadcaster and critic. Marketers use social media as a key channel to communicate.

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Credit Photo: Paola Peralta
By Eileen Brown for Social Business | July 23, 2012 
From http://www.zdnet.com/ibm-announces-customer-tools-to-keep-the-cmo-and-cio-happy-7000001406/

Like Apple, IBM doing its own thing

Steve Lohr, perhaps one of the most underrated tech writers at the New York Times, argued in a post Monday that IBM is no longer a tech bellwether. Instead it is an class of its own, much like Apple. This is the relevant bit in his article:

I.B.M. is doing its own thing in the enterprise market, much as Apple is in consumer technology. Both are separated from the industry pack. In I.B.M.’s case, to be sure, that separation has been a more subtle and evolutionary process than it has been at Apple, the blockbuster product machine.

I.B.M. talks about the “industrialization of services” as a key strategic goal. That industrialization process includes paring services jobs down to standardized, repeatable tasks; spreading the work around to world to where it can be done most efficiently and most inexpensively; and steadily automating simpler tasks with software.

The benefits of a globalized work force should diminish over time, as wages rise for skilled workers in India, for example. But if more and more services work can be done with software instead of people, I.B.M.’s profit margins could well keep improving — and the company could separate itself further from other tech suppliers.

Lohr is spot on. Apple has been marching to its own drum, creating markets by producing products that eschew the conventional wisdom. IBM has done this by moving away from commodity hardware to a more “insights” based platform approach.
By selling these intelligent platforms (Smart Cities and Smarter Commerce) as solutions instead of offering them as “packages,” the company has distinguished itself from the likes of Dell and HP, which are weighed down by their past and reliance on an older way of doing business.

By Om Malik Jul. 23, 2012,
From http://gigaom.com/2012/07/23/like-apple-ibm-doing-its-own-thing/