A request for change, not a change request

It’s amazing and, to be honest, frustrating that we regularly hear clients and prospects telling us that “We can’t deploy our marketing plan until next year because it needs a change request and that takes our IT team a minimum of 12 months” or “We are in a two year build phase for our customer database so we can’t change our communication plans until next year.”

Surely this is the tail wagging the dog! You, your marketing director or, worst of all, your customers will probably have left before the solution is ever implemented.

Let’s take a step back. The role of IT or an IT department has to be as an enabler for the rest of the business – understanding the requirements of different business areas and working with them to source and implement solutions that deliver the necessary functionality while mitigating security risks.

We don’t view IT as something that should dictate how brands interact with their customers. The trick is to use technology to identify and understand changes in customer demand, decide how you want to respond and to do so in a way that enables you to capitalize on (or minimize) the impact of the change in customer behaviour. The moment that IT starts to encroach on a brand’s ability to market itself, speed to market, competitive advantage and probably sales are compromised.

These are simple principles that hopefully most marketers would agree with. However, the reality is that in too many case IT departments are dictating the terms, timelines and functionality. Most IT is shrouded in a veil of mystery which prevents proper scrutiny and wouldn’t be tolerated in any other business discipline – if the Finance guy can’t justify why a budget is being cut, he isn’t going to be allowed to cut the budget. But because a lot of marketers don’t “get” IT or are even scared of “IT” they are reluctant to challenge or simply state their requirements.

Fortunately, thanks to some fairly recent developments, it doesn’t have to be this way.

Open Source Software has entered the mainstream and gives a practical alternative to licence based software. Rather than buying expensive software licences, Open Source gives us the option to download the software for free and then pay for consultancy and support in using the software if it is needed. The benefits for marketing departments are clear: you can implement something fast and prove the business case, you aren’t committing significant budget to something that you may want to change or throw away, it is a customized solution for your business not generic to businesses that could be like yours and you build knowledge and value internally.

Open Source software has gone beyond the domain of the geek with commercial Open Source software (such as Linux and Google’s Android) now widely used and blue chip IT consultancies like Accenture and IBM advocating its consideration – have a look…

Agile approaches to IT development make Open Source software even more powerful. If a project is managed in an Agile way, you define your requirements and priorities and start developing with solutions available for use as soon as they are ready – delivery time for each stage is typically weeks rather than months (or years). It’s iterative, fast and perfectly suited to marketing-led technology. If you are interested, take a look at this somewhat lengthy video

So there are viable, commercial alternatives to massive lead times, massive IT costs that dwarf your marketing budget and solutions that are designed for the market rather than your business. The challenge is in the thinking, the strategy and having the confidence to treat technology as something that powers your brand.