If you've ever seen a group of one-year-olds play, you will have noticed that, while they will focus on their toys and play with their mum, they don't really play with each other, but next to each other. This is until some interaction is forced by circumstances; a ball slips from the grasp of one and rolls over to another who refuses to return it. Then it's tears and protests from both, until they can be distracted.
It's only later in life that they develop the ability to co-operate, and learn that in doing so their levels of productivity and satisfaction leap. Some never learn these skills, and it's tempting to say that they tend to end up in IT; the reality is that they work in marketing, too.
There has always been a dilemma about how to organise companies. Should we structure around our customer, or our skills? Most companies have divided into disciplines - finance, operations, marketing, IT and so on - arguing that professional development, skill-based management and operational efficiency generate greater benefits than possible in a business structured around customers, even though it makes it harder to get the customer's voice to reach through the company.
It's a compromise embarked upon knowingly, and was well-suited to a stable business environment where interaction between departments could be structured and process-managed.
The digital revolution has changed all that. For marketers, traditional pain points were their interfaces with finance and operations management. Successful chief marketers learned the language of finance and formed collaborative working arrangements with operations - product and service innovation could derive from operational innovation, while operations can use marketing's customer understanding.
For years, the IT department looked after the back room, making sure the phones worked, payroll functioned and someone was available on the phone to tell you to turn it off and on again. The emphasis was more on the T than the I.
Now, all sorts of information is controlled by IT, from social media to site analytics. Without this stuff, marketing is flying blind; but in many companies, the interface between marketing and IT fails, resulting in inadequate data. The evidence is clear in the number of third-party suppliers brought in to meet marketing's need for intelligence.
Moreover, just as operations can be the source of propositions that marketing can exploit (better packaging, lower prices, faster service), the web has given IT a customer-facing role.
In 1994, when FedEx introduced the first online package-tracking service, Argos pioneered online reservations for in-store collection and American Airlines launched e-ticketing, IT systems made it possible. But IT is just as often the source of disadvantage. I recall talking to the head of an online bank I had helped to launch; departing customers complained they had no running balance, while the attitude of the parent bank's IT department was 'take a ticket, it'll be nine months'.
Another global brand I worked with had its IT department running its website. It was reliable, but inflexible; useless to marketing, which needed to launch 20 products a year on it. The number of microsites it commissioned was a direct representation of the site's lack of fitness for purpose.
Information, and the technology we use to manipulate it, are now critical sources of competitive advantage. In this digital age, the ability of chief marketing officers and their IT equivalents to collaborate effectively isn't just playing nicely; it's a life skill.
Andrew Walmsley is a digital pluralist
30 SECONDS ON ... FedEx
- Federal Express Corporation began operations in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1973, the result of an idea developed by Frederick W Smith - who remains the corporation's chairman, president and chief executive.
- As a Yale University undergraduate, in 1965, he had written a term paper detailing the economic inadequacy of the passenger routes used by most airfreight shippers, and put forward an argument for a system designed to accommodate time-sensitive items.
- On 17 April 1973, Federal Express launched 14 Dassault Falcon jets from a Memphis airport; 389 employees delivered 186 packages overnight to 25 US cities.
- It launched COSMOS, its centralised, real-time computer management system, in 1979.
- With the launch of Fedex.com in 1994, it became the first to offer online package status tracking and allow customers to process and manage shipping from their desktop.
- FedEx achieved revenues of $34.7bn (£21.3bn) in its 2010 financial year.