Breaking down digital silos

To absolutely no one’s surprise, a new Gartner survey of more than 3,100 CIOs and technology executives found that 52% of digital initiatives fail. If anything, the surprise is that the number isn’t higher. Way back in 2014, I was writing about how and why big data projects fail. “Most companies simply don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to big data,” I said.

Today, it’s largely the same, though Gartner points to a common characteristic of enterprises that succeed with digital transformation: They don’t treat it as an isolated IT project. For the so-called “digital vanguard” whose initiatives succeed 71% of the time, Gartner VP Raf Gelders argues, “CIOs and CxOs are equally responsible [for digital delivery], accountable and involved in delivering the digital solutions their enterprises need.”

Not just the tech folks, in other words. Business and tech people working together. I’ve seen this principle play out firsthand in my own work.

Shared goals, shared success

I run developer relations for MongoDB. My team is filled with engineers who write code and eschew marketing. Yet my team sits within the marketing org. Different companies do this differently, with some developer relations teams housed within the product or engineering groups (as we used to be at MongoDB). But in my experience, developer relations fits better within marketing precisely because few (if any) within my team would consider themselves marketers. For a company that focuses on serving developers, the last thing we want is traditional marketing. Instead, we want “marketing” to look like deep technical workshops, how-to tutorials, etc.

None of this works without being joined at the hip with more traditional marketing functions. My team knows, for example, that all their work has to support larger business goals. At the same time, these other teams (strategic marketing, field marketing, digital and growth, etc.) also know that they can count on us to support them and help inform the work they do.

This confluence of different functions isn’t a bug, it’s a feature, and it’s something that needs to happen well beyond my developer relations team and marketing. The best companies, whatever their industry, marry technology with business functions. According to Gartner VP Daniel Sanchez-Reina, “To become a digital vanguard, CIOs … need to prioritize four areas: making digital platforms easy for the workforce to build digital solutions, teaching them the interdependencies between technology and business, helping business leaders become innovation leaders at digital, and expanding digital skills beyond the IT department.” Technology, in other words, isn’t meant to sit in a silo. It needs to be central to how all areas of the business operate.

CIOs and CxOs together

As Sanchez-Reina put it, “CIOs need their CxOs to work together and co-lead with them. So their fortunes are intertwined; one cannot succeed without the other.” As an industry, we’ve talked about this for a long time, but it’s easy to say and hard to pull off. In my own experience, the key to making it work is shared goals.

In any organization, people spend their time on the things that get them the most recognition, the highest chance of a positive employee rating (for promotions or bonuses, for example). The way to turn this to the company’s advantage is to align goals between complementary teams. In the case of digital initiatives, such as generative AI and cloud computing, IT and other technical teams must be aligned at the goals level with other teams (marketing, sales, product, etc.) to ensure success. Otherwise, you’re at risk of being one more company confessing to failed digital projects.