As more and more marketing operations projects take shape requiring partnership with IT teams, I, as a marketer, offer the following heartfelt message to my colleagues in IT (and would be happy to get together over a beer to talk this through).
I don’t want your job and would like for you to keep yours.
I have no wish to eliminate your position or any part of your role or that of your team.
I don’t want to take your experience for granted.
I don’t want to minimize your role or your opinion.
I don’t want home-grown shopping carts or created-from-scratch software solutions when pre-built, perfectly acceptable solutions already exist from vendors that offer excellent customer support.
I don’t want hard-coded websites.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of our back-end operations, the people involved or the time it has taken to get us to where we are today.
I don’t want to manage to the edge case.
I don’t want to jeopardize our security, expose the company to risk or allow cyber-criminals to make off with our intellectual property.
Because what I really want is:
I want tools and systems that have more than one individual that understands the inner workings so we can fix it when it breaks.
I want tools that iterate with feedback from users in weeks, not months or years.
I want website pages I can edit, quickly and conveniently, without having to create a ticket and stand in line.
I want to partner with you to make the most of the knowledge you already have about our existing systems and tools, how they work and how we can benefit our customers and move our businesses forward.
Sometimes it’s going to have to be good enough! While perfection is the goal, forward progress is the key. Let me know when you’re ready for that beer.
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