The split between IT, marketing and customer-facing roles continues to rear its ugly head. Stats from Storyblok show that only 30% of IT leaders involve their marketing teams in user experience decisions. Those choices impact the customer experience, resulting in less-than-optimal websites for users, reflecting poorly on the business.
The Storyblok survey of 200 IT leaders across global brands finds that, on the plus side, 66% say they work closely with marketing on structural page and content updates. However, 79% say website development planning should be improved. And 34% need to improve collaboration with marketing when planning projects.
Despite that, the fact that most IT leaders say they know their planning process could be better, highlights cross-team issues, and the need for the right people in collaborative teams.
Whose responsibility is IT anyway?
As businesses become all digital, there is less gatekeeping by IT. However, in some companies, they fiercely protect functions with a critical customer/marketing impact on the business. Marketers can sway IT types by waving papers like Gartner’s “3 Crucial 2025 Trends for CMOs” at them, and push for greater integration between teams on anything that appears beyond the internal firewall.
“Collaboration between developers and marketers continues to be a struggle for most companies. As this data shows, IT teams like to think they’re working well with their marketing colleagues, but their actions prove otherwise. We built the Concept Room to make planning digital projects in Storyblok as collaborative and joyful as building them.” says Dominik Angerer, CEO and co-founder of Storyblok.
To help developers and marketers plan digital projects together, Storyblok is introducing the Concept Room as part of Storyblok Labs, a place for users to test its latest features. The Concept Room is a digital whiteboard where teams can visually map out a project structure. The concepts can be linked to components within Storyblok, to get projects started quickly across teams.
The likes of a headless CMS make it easy for a business to remain customer-focused without the need for IT interference. The wide adoption of no-code, AI and other solutions could also see IT’s power weaken. However, IT needs oversight for security, data protection, compliance and other issues, so any high-growth business should keep its marketing and customer-focused teams aware of the all teams’ wider responsibilities. The rise of the “CMOs’power in the boardroom” will also shift the balance of power.