Onboarding New Technology – IT Governance Audit

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IT at John Crane

I started with research into the IT structure at our company. First, I checked our Leadership team for a CIO. No such luck. I saw a Chief Technology Officer but after looking into the roles that make up that team, I discovered that its related to the technological advances we are making in our products and services, such as our Asset Management Program that monitors equipment to help determine when a seal or pump is about to break down to prevent a complete shutdown. Well, I had the name of our onsite IT guy Richard, I thought I’d explore up the chain. That’s when I realized that our IT department, or as they call it BIS, is part of our parent company Smiths Group, which we are a division of. That level of removal may explain why our marketing department doesn’t have a day to day relationship with the BIS department, aside from when our computers break down.

Building a Relationship with IT

Knowing that we are about to implement a crucially important piece of MarTech, how do I help get BIS involved? I think my best tactic is to reach out to Gus, our IT Client Services Supervisor. I want to let Gus know that we are onboarding the technology and I am creating a guiding coalition to help make the organization change as successful as possible including a member from the BIS team to bring that viewpoint to the table. Especially when it comes to scalability. Despite having over 110k contacts in our email platform, we are starting of Marketo with 10k contacts. If BIS can help us come up with a process to know when it’s time to scale up, that can help us grow healthily.

“The modern IT worker is a tech-savvy innovator who creates change across the organization’s entirety, not just a single department.” (The Changing Role Of IT In The Future Of Business) Once I have a counterpart in BIS that I’ve established a relationship with I want to bring them on board to help us figure out projects and processes overall, including helping us figure out how to be General Data Protection Regulation compliant across all of our systems. For instance, GDPR requires that once someone unsubscribes from any communication with your company, they need to be removed from all databases we own. How can we make sure that we have removed them from not just Marketo and Mailchimp, but Sales operated techs such as C4C and other systems that we don’t know about? Can bringing them onboard help get our salespeople using C4C properly instead of using their homegrown systems, since that leaves us vulnerable to millions of dollars in fines?

Current Marketing Technology at John Crane

“Marketing executives are being tasked with leveraging technology to improve customer experience, drive client growth, and meet loyalty goals. Therefore, they’ve become more reliant on IT for web-and data-based marketing activities, such as behavioral targeting and geo-tracking” (Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT)

I work in a department that has gone rogue IT wise. So much so, that when I suggested earlier this week that we should include someone from IT at our upcoming marketing strategy event, I was asked why. Yet marketing and IT executives often don’t speak the same language or understand each other’s goals or roadmaps. (Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT) This even though one of the most important parts of our strategy are how to use the MarTech we already have and move to Marketo. For this report, I’ve decided to look at some of the MarTech that we are using to figure out where we could use IT governance to be successful.

I’ve only fleshed out a few of the technologies so far. How to attack all the technology? I’m going to borrow Gartner’s Run, Grow, Transform framework despite it reflecting monetary spending, not resources.

RUN

C4C

“IT is being used to improve the way organizations interact with their customers. Specifically, customer relationship management systems – often referred to simply as CRM in the business world – track and organize every interaction a company has with its current and potential customers.” (Five IT Functions in an Organization)

According to its product overview page “The SAP Cloud for Customer solution helps you manage day-to-day sales contacts efficiently by sending and receiving signals between front- and back-office solutions and providing a single view of the customer.” That isn’t how its currently working for us. At present, I download a daily excel report from our Sitecore website of the forms filled from customers on our website wishing to connect with our sales team, which I alter the formatting of before I copy to a template that communicates with C4C to add these leads into our system. When that’s uploaded, a notification is sent to a Lead Coordinator based on the location of the potential customer who then assigns it to a salesperson for them to follow up with the customer. However, that’s not happening. We’ve been working with Sales Enablement to try to get to the bottom of this. Some say it’s because we have an older workforce that doesn’t care for technology and wants to do it their way outside of the system. Others say that not all sales folks have access to C4C and even if they do, they aren’t given any training on how to operate. Now I’m wondering if we should include someone from our IT department to help us figure out a way to streamline the process and determine how to improve them so that our salespeople are excited to use a system that makes their jobs easier.

Sitecore

Our website uses Sitecore as our web content management system. There are a few issues around Sitecore that need to be addressed. The first is that only two people have access to the website, my boss Skyler and myself. And I was never trained on the system despite many requests. If Skyler and I, who sit next to each other, caught the plague next week, you better hope you don’t need any work done on the website. A second issue is that the version of Sitecore we are operating on is wildly outdated. We are currently on Sitecore 6, the current version is Sitecore 9. Our version is so old in fact, that we can’t do a direct update from 6 to 9. We will have to do a bridge update or two. All in, it will cost us $100k to update. This sounds reasonable for the size of the company we have until you realize that it won’t change the look or feel of our website at all. Our IT department should be included to help us determine a plan for all future updates including deadlines and other triggers for improving our technology.

Rightpoint

Rightpoint isn’t a technology but a company that we work with on our website for help with design, maintenance, and more. A project that I’ve been working with them on that our IT department might be interested in taking part in is making sure our website is secure and compliant. When I started at John Crane a year ago, I ran the website through several audits to check its health. It was concerning across the board, from areas of the website that weren’t properly secure and more. Another project I would love to include IT on is our Contact Us page mentioned previously. Currently, it’s the only way to contact us on the website. While it’s meant for customers to connect with our sales team, it’s a catch-all for anyone who wants to ask about employment, products they want to sell us, charities that want us to sponsor their 5k, and ex-employees looking for lost W-2’s. At present, I’m manually weeding them out and they are going nowhere. In part because I can’t get HR, Procurement, etc. to understand that it’s not sustainable to individually forward those contacts to my guesstimate of who should handle them. Working with Rightpoint to create a design and IT to create the process that information moves along will improve everyone’s workflows and satisfy those trying to get ahold of us.

MailChimp

One of the many platforms that I brought on board to replace outdated legacy programs was MailChimp. Previously we were using a system called Etelligent that some think was specially built for our parent company. Unfortunately, it was an out of date and limited platform. You could not link to anything, couldn’t add more than two images, couldn’t get useful analytics, etc., etc. MailChimp has very much become my baby. We started using it in May to send our first ever company email. The list of who we were sending the email to come from several regional sales managers and product line managers. The data was a mess. I decided to only add in the email addresses and no other data like names, companies, etc. because there were so many bad practices in the 25k accounts shared with me. It continued this way, with each series of emails that our marketing and communication managers give me, I’m given a mystery list of unknown origin and health. I’ve started going directly to C4C and other sources to build a robust database in MailChimp. I am not supported on this by my director even though it has improved our targeting for emails. Bringing on someone from IT to look over this whole process, tell me what I don’t know, and help me find sources of clean data as well as a process to keep that data safe when more people have access to it than just myself would be invaluable.

Hootsuite

Teams

Jotform

Survey Monkey

Brandfolder

Wistia

Intranet

Readytalk

GROW

Pathfactory

Tableau

Google Analytics

Google Ads

TRANSFORM

Mobile version of the website

Marketo

Going Forward

“Now accurate business planning, effective marketing, global sales, systematic management, real-time monitoring, instant customer support, and long-term business growth cannot be achieved at the optimum level without IT.” (The Role of Information Technology in Business Success) I realize now just how important IT can be to the success of marketing and the larger business. I’m inspired to reach out to our IT team to take a deep dive into our MarTech stack and see where improvements can be made. It’s time for us to stop being a rogue department and build important relationships with our IT folks, even if they aren’t John Crane employees. Doing so will ensure that we reach the goals we’ve set out to accomplish.

Citations

Afzal, A., & Writer, A. A. B. F. (2015, May 14). The Role of Information Technology in Business Success. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/role-information-technology-business-success-abid-afzal-butt/.

Newman, D. (2016, July 28). The Changing Role of IT In the Future of Business. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/danielnewman/2016/07/26/the-changing-role-of-it-in-the-future-of-business/#1492d205525d.

SAP Cloud for Customer l Omnichannel Customer Engagement. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.sap.com/products/cloud-customer-engagement.html.

Shumway, A. P. J. (2016, March 18). Bridging the Gap Between Marketing and IT. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2016/03/bridging-the-gap-between-marketing-and-it.

Walters, S. (2019, August 23). Five IT Functions in an Organization. Retrieved from https://yourbusiness.azcentral.com/five-functions-organization-2102.html.