CIO and CMO Digital Strategy: Who Should Own It

CIO and CMO digital strategy alignment is one of the most consequential and consistently mishandled relationships in large organisations. When these two functions operate in silos, the business pays for it twice: once in wasted technology investment, and again in marketing that cannot scale because the infrastructure underneath it was built without commercial intent.

The organisations that get this right treat digital strategy as a shared operating model, not a jurisdictional dispute. The ones that get it wrong spend years buying technology that marketing cannot use and running campaigns that IT cannot support.

Why This Relationship Keeps Breaking Down

I have worked across more than 30 industries in agency leadership, and the CIO-CMO tension is one of the most consistent structural problems I have encountered. It is not usually about ego, though that does not help. It is about two functions that were built for different purposes being asked to share ownership of something neither was originally designed to lead.

The CIO’s mandate is stability, security, and scalability. The CMO’s mandate is growth, speed, and commercial output. These are not naturally compatible operating rhythms. IT procurement cycles run in years. Marketing campaign cycles run in weeks. When you force those two timelines to share a technology roadmap, something has to give, and it is usually the marketing team’s ability to move at the speed the business needs.

I saw this play out in a particularly clear way when I was running an agency with a large financial services client. The marketing team had identified a personalisation opportunity that could have meaningfully improved conversion across their digital properties. The technology to do it existed. The budget existed. But the CIO’s team had a 14-month backlog of infrastructure work, and the marketing use case was not prioritised because it had not been scoped into the annual technology plan. The opportunity window closed. The project was eventually delivered 18 months later into a market that had moved on.

That is not a technology failure. That is a governance failure. And it is entirely preventable.

If you are thinking about how this fits into broader questions of marketing leadership and commercial accountability, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the structural and strategic dimensions of how senior marketers operate inside complex organisations.

What Each Function Actually Needs From the Other

Before you can fix the relationship, you need to be honest about what each side actually needs, not what they say in alignment workshops.

The CMO needs the CIO to understand that marketing technology is not a support function. It is the operating infrastructure for revenue generation. When a CDP is down, or a data feed is broken, or a consent management platform is misconfigured, marketing cannot run effective campaigns. The dependency is direct and commercial. The CIO who treats marketing technology as a lower-priority IT ticket queue is quietly costing the business money.

The CIO needs the CMO to understand that every new tool request carries integration cost, security risk, and long-term maintenance overhead. The CMO who procures a new platform without IT involvement and then expects smooth integration is creating technical debt that someone else has to pay down. I have seen martech stacks with 40 or 50 tools in them, half of which are not properly connected to anything, because successive marketing leaders bought technology without a coherent architecture in mind.

The honest version of this conversation is: the CMO needs speed and commercial flexibility, the CIO needs stability and architectural coherence, and neither gets what they need unless they build a shared operating model that accounts for both.

Where Digital Strategy Actually Lives

One of the most productive reframes I have seen in large organisations is moving the conversation away from “who owns digital strategy” and toward “what does digital strategy need to deliver, and what does each function need to contribute to make that happen.”

Digital strategy is not a technology plan. It is not a marketing plan. It is the intersection of both, expressed in terms of customer outcomes and commercial results. A digital strategy that is written by IT without marketing input tends to be architecturally coherent but commercially inert. A digital strategy written by marketing without IT input tends to be commercially ambitious but technically undeliverable.

The organisations that get this right tend to define digital strategy at three levels. First, the commercial ambition: what customer behaviours are we trying to change, what revenue outcomes are we targeting, and what does the digital experience need to do to support those outcomes. Second, the capability requirement: what technology, data infrastructure, and integration architecture is needed to deliver that experience at scale. Third, the operating model: who owns what, how decisions get made when priorities conflict, and how performance is measured across both functions.

Without all three levels being explicitly agreed, digital strategy documents tend to be aspirational slide decks that neither function feels fully accountable for delivering.

The Data Problem at the Centre of Everything

If there is one place where CIO and CMO misalignment causes the most concrete commercial damage, it is data governance. And it is almost always the place where both functions assume the other one has it handled.

Marketing needs clean, accessible, consented customer data to run effective personalisation, segmentation, and measurement. IT needs that same data to be governed, secure, compliant, and architecturally sound. These requirements are not in conflict. But in most organisations, they are managed by different teams with different tooling, different definitions, and different priorities.

The result is what I would describe as data that technically exists but is practically unusable. Marketing cannot access it quickly enough. When they do access it, the definitions do not match what they expected. Consent records are incomplete. Attribution is broken because event data is not firing correctly. The personalisation that looked straightforward in the strategy presentation requires six months of data engineering work before it can go live.

Optimizely has written usefully about the gap between personalised and genuinely personal customer experiences, and the distinction they draw is relevant here: most organisations are stuck at “personalised” because their data infrastructure cannot support anything more sophisticated. That is not a marketing failure. It is a data governance failure that sits squarely at the intersection of CIO and CMO responsibility.

The fix is not a new CDP. The fix is a shared data governance framework that both functions have contributed to and are held accountable for. That means agreed definitions, agreed consent architecture, agreed data quality standards, and agreed escalation paths when something breaks. It is unglamorous work. It is also the foundation that everything else sits on.

The Martech Stack Problem Nobody Wants to Admit

Most martech stacks are significantly underused. Not because the technology is wrong, but because it was procured without a clear use case that both functions agreed on, integrated without proper data architecture, and then handed to marketing teams who were not given adequate time or training to use it properly.

I have been in enough agency pitches and client reviews to know that “we have a sophisticated martech stack” often means “we have spent a lot of money on software licences and we are using about 30% of the functionality.” The gap between what the technology can do and what the organisation actually does with it is where most of the value is being left on the table.

This is a joint CIO-CMO problem. The CMO specifies the commercial requirement. The CIO specifies the technical architecture. If those two specifications are not aligned before procurement, you end up with a tool that satisfies one set of requirements and fails the other. Marketing gets a platform they cannot integrate with their existing workflow. IT gets a platform they cannot support within their current architecture. And the vendor gets a multi-year contract renewal regardless of whether the technology delivered any commercial value.

The discipline of writing a clear offer, in the sense that Copyblogger describes when talking about commercial propositions, applies here too. Before any martech procurement, both functions should be able to articulate clearly: what problem does this solve, what does success look like in 12 months, and how will we know if it has worked. If either function cannot answer those questions, the procurement should wait.

How the Best Organisations Structure This

There is no single organisational model that works for every business. But there are structural patterns that tend to produce better outcomes than others.

The first is a shared digital leadership function. Some organisations have resolved the CIO-CMO tension by creating a Chief Digital Officer role that sits above both functions for digital strategy purposes. This works when the CDO has genuine authority over technology investment decisions and is held accountable for commercial outcomes, not just delivery milestones. It fails when the CDO becomes a coordination layer with no real decision-making power, which is more common than it should be.

The second is embedded technology partnership. Rather than having IT and marketing as separate functions that meet periodically to discuss shared projects, some organisations embed technology leads within marketing and give them dual reporting lines. The marketing technologist role, sometimes called a marketing engineer or growth engineer, sits close enough to the commercial function to understand what marketing needs and close enough to IT to know what is actually buildable. This model tends to work well in organisations where the digital marketing output is complex enough to justify dedicated technical resource.

The third is a shared OKR framework. When CIO and CMO teams are measured against different objectives, misalignment is structurally inevitable. When both functions have shared objectives tied to customer and commercial outcomes, the incentive to collaborate becomes concrete rather than aspirational. I have seen this work particularly well when the shared OKRs are set at board level and both CIOs and CMOs are required to present against them together. It changes the dynamic of the conversation significantly when both functions are publicly accountable for the same outcome.

The Measurement Question That Both Functions Avoid

One of the more uncomfortable conversations in CIO-CMO alignment is measurement. Not because measurement is technically difficult, though it often is, but because both functions have an incentive to avoid the kind of rigorous outcome measurement that would reveal whether their shared digital investments are actually working.

Marketing tends to measure activity: impressions, clicks, sessions, leads. IT tends to measure delivery: uptime, deployment velocity, ticket resolution time. Neither set of metrics answers the question the board actually cares about, which is whether the digital investment is producing commercial return.

Early in my career, I ran a paid search campaign at lastminute.com for a music festival. The results came in fast, six figures of revenue within roughly a day from a relatively simple campaign. What made it legible was that we had a direct line from spend to booking to revenue. There was no ambiguity about whether it worked. That kind of clarity is rare in complex digital programmes, but it should be the standard both functions are held to.

The organisations that measure digital strategy well tend to build measurement frameworks before they build the strategy, not after. They agree on what commercial outcomes they are trying to move, what leading indicators they will use to track progress, and what attribution model is appropriate for the type of investment being made. Then they hold both functions accountable to those measures, not to proxy metrics that make each function look good regardless of whether the business is better off.

Understanding how inbound and outbound digital approaches interact with this measurement challenge is worth examining. Unbounce’s breakdown of inbound versus outbound marketing is a useful reference for thinking about where different digital channels sit in the commercial funnel and how they should be measured differently.

What a Productive CIO-CMO Conversation Actually Looks Like

Most CIO-CMO conversations I have observed are either too operational, focused on specific tool issues or project timelines, or too abstract, focused on digital transformation vision without any concrete accountability. The productive version sits between those two extremes.

A useful starting point is a joint audit of the current digital capability against the commercial strategy. Not a technology audit and a marketing audit run separately and then compared. A single audit that asks: given what the business is trying to achieve commercially, what is our current digital capability, where are the gaps, and what would it cost to close them. This forces both functions to work from the same commercial brief rather than their respective departmental priorities.

From that audit, the joint roadmap becomes much more tractable. The CIO can see which technology investments are tied to specific commercial outcomes and prioritise accordingly. The CMO can see which of their ambitions are dependent on infrastructure work that needs to be sequenced before the marketing programme can be built. Both functions are working from the same map rather than separate ones that only partially overlap.

The conversation also needs to include an honest discussion of risk tolerance. Marketing tends to have a higher risk appetite than IT, because the cost of moving slowly in a competitive market is visible and commercial. IT tends to have a lower risk appetite because the cost of a security breach or a system failure is also visible and commercial, but in a different direction. Neither position is wrong. But they need to be explicitly negotiated rather than left to surface as conflict when a specific decision needs to be made.

There is more on how senior marketing leaders manage these kinds of cross-functional accountability challenges in the Career and Leadership in Marketing section, which covers the structural and operational dimensions of marketing leadership across different organisational contexts.

The Practical Starting Point

If you are a CMO or CIO reading this and recognising your own organisation in the problems described, the practical starting point is simpler than most people expect.

Start with one shared project. Not a transformation programme. Not a new platform. One specific commercial objective that requires both marketing capability and technology capability to deliver, and build a joint team around it with shared accountability for the outcome. Use that project to develop the working patterns, the decision-making frameworks, and the measurement approach that you want to scale across the broader digital strategy.

When I was building out agency capability at iProspect, growing the team from around 20 people to over 100, the most effective way to break down internal silos was always to create shared accountability for a specific client outcome rather than trying to redesign the org chart first. The structure followed the working pattern, not the other way around. The same principle applies here.

The CIO-CMO relationship does not need to be a source of organisational friction. It needs to be the commercial engine room of the business. Getting there requires both functions to be honest about what they need, clear about what they can deliver, and jointly accountable for outcomes that neither can achieve alone.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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