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Chief information officer reporting relationships continue to be distanced from the strategy function. The marketing function is experiencing this same distancing from strategy. However, the two functions should be on the leading edge of strategy, rather than the receiving end.

If you are like many small businesses, you may be overwhelmed by a plethora of technologies that all claim to grow your business, reduce your expenses, improve customer service and enhance employee productivity. After all, your focus is on the day-to-day business, whether you are consumer service oriented (e.g., a retailer, restauranteur, motel operator), knowledge worker focused (e.g. a law office, software developer, advertising agency, real estate agency) or in the wholesale product or service business. Let’s look at four important technologies which could make a difference for your business.

By now, we’re all well aware of the effects of the past 18 months’ global financial crisis: Advertising buys declined by as much as 21 percent. As the overall market softened, so did the price tag for purchasing ads particularly in the more traditional realms of radio, print and outdoor. What media purchasing trends will continue into the near future?

CIOs are tired of being regarded as corporate scapegoats, frustrated by having to apply 20th-century tools to 21st-century challenges, and are eager to pounce on a variety of new approaches and technologies that will enhance their companies' competitiveness and engage entire organizations more intimately with customers. This report looks at a variety of new approaches and technologies that let these rebels take on a whole new role, enhancing their companies' competitiveness and engaging their entire organizations more intimately with customers.

The technology industry's Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council last fall released its Measures+Metrics study, which showed branding at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to measuring marketing performance. Technology CMOs also said that brand equity is one of the least reported measurements to senior management. Following the heady days of the late 1990s when money was plentiful and brand was king in the technology kingdom, branding has deflated on the same curve as bottom lines. This article examines the reason behind the slide in brand importance within the tech industry.

Five significant trends have emerged that are driving the demand for even more capabilities from MDM technologies causing disruption in the market and potentially creating game-changing opportunities for companies deploying MDM solutions.

Chief information officer reporting relationships continue to be distanced from the strategy function. The marketing function is experiencing this same distancing from strategy. However, the two functions should be on the leading edge of strategy, rather than the receiving end.

However, these stereotypes are fading, and CMOs and CIOs now realize that they are actually more similar than they originally thought. Both CIOs and CMOs face the challenge of proving themselves to their peers, measuring their value to the business, and aligning objectives to the overall strategy. Marketing and technology are increasingly overlapped, and it is time for CIOs and CMOs to focus on the benefits to partnership, rather than continuing the battles of the past.

It is interesting to note that the bottom ranking peer relationships, those with the CFO and the CIO, might be with the two departments that are the most critical to marketing’s success. CMOs who want to improve their technology-savviness are also aware of just how necessary a good working relationship with the CIO is.

Intimacy transforms purchasing, moving it from transactional, mechanical, to a more emotional realm. Find out how companies can create intimacy with anonymous traffic using agile and intelligent digital marketing.

Companies are collecting and storing more data than ever--about employees, customers, transactions, partners and assets. And this data is being accessed and shared not just on the corporate network, but also on mobile devices and via collaboration technologies. In the interest of protecting this information, companies are increasingly turning to data loss prevention (DLP) tools. This paper examines the advantages of DLP and the obstacles to avoid in its deployment.

Digital Strategy, a supplement produced by Marketing Week magazine, provides information for marketers in the new digital age. Whether it’s search, affiliate marketing, mobile, behavioural targeting or analytics, what’s important is the growing need for marketers to become more sophisticated in their approach; to become more considered in their use of individual channels and to integrate them better to derive maximum benefit.

Marketing and IT. CIO and CMO. Many believe that these two functions and these two roles could not be more extreme in their differences. The stereotypes show one as creative, driven by the gut, with little regard for process or budget, and the other as a rigid, risk-averse gatekeeper. However, these stereotypes are fading, and CMOs and CIOs now realize that they are actually more similar than they originally thought. Both CIOs and CMOs face the challenge of proving themselves to their peers, measuring their value to the business, and aligning objectives to the overall strategy. Marketing and technology are increasingly overlapped, and it is time for CIOs and CMOs to focus on the benefits to partnership, rather than continuing the battles of the past.

Companies need to act now to define standards for success of their online assets and maintain them into the future.

In-store marketing accounts for nearly 60% of the dollars manufacturers spend to get their products noticed on the shelf. This Ad Age Insights white paper provides a blueprint for how retailers and marketers can work together to sell more.

The On-Demand Generation: tweens, teens and young adults expect to get the content they want, when they want it and where they want it. This Ad Age Insights white paper explains how to reach them.

Since 1971, marketers have seen seven periods of recession and recovery. Who survived and thrived, and why? This look back through 80 years of Ad Age archives finds the brands that made the right bet when times were tough.

Dumenco's State of the Media will provide a comprehensive overview of where the shifts are happening in TV, cable, print, radio/satellite radio, portals, web aggregators, social media, web video, and mobile. This white paper includes over 30 charts.

Compuware recently commissioned a global IDC survey of 474 business and IT decision makers in order to better understand what kinds of performance and availability information business decision makers need to have in order to effectively operate their Internet-enabled business activities.

According to Control Objectives for Information and related Technology (COBIT), an IT governance framework, strategic alignment focuses on ensuring the linkage of business and IT plans, on defining, maintaining and validating the IT value proposition, and on aligning IT operations with enterprise operations. While COBIT provides the definition of what alignment is all about, this guide will help explain how you actually get there in practice. There are three stages of alignment: Order taking, Priority setting, and Strategy setting.

The IT Process Institute has created this paper to help business leaders understand the IT organization’s role as a strategy enabler, better communicate IT’s primary purpose business value-add in strategic terms, and know when and how to change an IT organization’s archetype to better meet the needs of the business.

Aligning IT and business strategy remains one of the top issues that business executives and CIOs wrestle with. Maximizing the return on IT investments requires that these investments link directly to strategic business objectives. One of the major obstacles to achieving strategy alignment is that many organizations do a poor job of communicating their strategy. When people who are key to executing strategy don’t know what the strategy is or understand how their day-to-day activities contribute to strategy execution, it’s highly likely overall enterprise performance is going to suffer. Strategy maps are one way to shore up communication about strategy with a visual representation.

Numerous studies over the years have shown that achieving Business/IT Alignment can lead to a unifying direction for a company, better leveraging of IT, improved communications, more efficient allocation of resources and increased competitive advantage. Yet, other studies reveal that only a minority of companies actually achieve some level of alignment between their business and their most strategic weapon, technology. This paper addresses the alignment issue from an application lifecycle management (ALM) perspective and points out the need for
an adaptive product management process that provides both vertical and horizontal alignment for developing products, systems or services.

Effective business-IT alignment is clearly an ongoing, "missionlike" goal for
organizations, aimed at ensuring they remain competitive and well adapted to
respond to the increasing demands of the environment. It therefore appeals to
the use of program management.The organizational business-IT alignment process is a perfect candidate to be modeled and managed as a program.

The business and IT need a common language and a common set of tools they both can use to collaborate on data issues. Learn how the business and IT can collaborate more effectively to better manage and use data to drive critical business initiatives.

As businesses re-orient themselves around a cloud model, new capabilities will emerge. Businesses will be able to solve problems that were not addressable before. They will also be able to solve old problems quicker, cheaper, and with higher quality results. This paper presents steps for CIOs and IT organizations to help prepare.

There’s nothing quite like a satisfied customer. But with growing reliance on online interactions, companies today are constantly competing—and sometimes struggling—to provide a better and more cost-effective online experience that meets customers’ increasingly complex needs.