Fifteen, even ten years back, there wasn't much to hope for by way of an executive consensus when it came to purchasing technology for a company. This was the sort of decision only the back office could make the folks in IT, charged with making all decisions as to the technologies that would be brought into the business. Enterprise software was an altogether different beast in this era and CIOs wielded as a result a unique power in the enterprise. Their roles were numerous: controller, financier, installer, integrator, and watchman.

Then came cloud computing, and with it, an entirely new way forward.
Overnight, the rules of old had been upended: the line of business had the ability to access and invest in technology on their own, without IT's sign-off, and could deploy these solutions based on performance and effectiveness, versus company mandate. Technology was aligned with the department. CIOs were at the periphery.

With this turn of the page, CMOs took on new prominence.
Marketing, by this point, had moved well past its air cover origins, when it was limited to qualitative impressions made by billboards, print ads, and radio spots; it had become a quantitative discipline driven by data, catering to the digital channels used by marketers and where today's buyers do their research. Because of this, decision making and spending priorities shifted CMOs now had unique technology needs of their own.

Which brings to us to the crossroads we face today.
According to Gartner, 23 percent of an average capital budget is now allocated for specialized software purchases, like marketing automation and analytics. There's definite proof that marketing and IT overlap in vital, substantial ways. It's just a matter of deciding what to make of that proof, whether to proceed the way we would ten or fifteen years back, as if IT and marketing have little in common, or to embrace the partnership that has been made possible, and actively encourage collaboration.