While we in the IT community have grown up thinking about information technology as primarily a business productivity tool, increasingly, information technology should be viewed as part of the media. Traditional media – newspapers, radio and television – have been mostly funded by advertising, and thus are heavily influenced by demographics, trends and fashions. This is what is happening in IT today, as marketing, advertising and entertainment fund the ongoing consumerization of our industry.

Since the emergence of the web in the early 1990s, enterprise IT has been experiencing the effects and challenges of this shift, and just about every firm has wrestled with the relationship between its enterprise IT and marketing organizations. How do we determine our digital strategy? Who 'owns' the company web site and digital brand? To what extent should marketing be free to do its own thing with technology and/or use outside suppliers? What is the best balance between marketing agility and business control?

These issues have not always been managed smoothly or well. Our research has shown that enterprise IT's relationship with marketing is less productive than with other parts of the company – finance, supply chain, operations, etc. There are many reasons for this (company politics, cultural differences, technological uncertainty, rapid change and so on), but the underlying cause is even more basic. As the web becomes the dominant societal medium, marketing and IT are becoming increasingly inseparable – arguably the single best example of the co-evolution of business and IT. Consequently, as long as IT and marketing are in separate organizations, a certain level of tension and complexity is inevitable.

Consider that marketing in the 1960s, '70s and '80s (the Baby Boom and Mad Men years) was typically a low-tech profession, largely involving ideas, images and the now increasingly hard-to-imagine three-martini lunch. Successful marketing executives had little feel for or interest in IT. From their perspective, high up in a posh downtown office, it was hard not to look down on all those scruffy computer people grinding away somewhere in the basement. IT, of course, has had its own prejudices, often seeing the marketing team as an overpaid bunch of empty suits unable to articulate what they really need or want.

Fast forward to today, and we see that marketing is now a hi-tech and quantitative profession. Modern marketing professionals are surrounded by technology options and challenges: web site designs, CRM systems, data warehouses, internet advertising services, business analytics, online community development, customer-centric operations, reputation management, etc. The rapid growth of mobility, social media and the cloud is clearly accelerating all of these demands, which is why the LEF is now putting so much emphasis on the emerging double-deep business/IT professional. The marketing leaders of the future must understand both the marketing priorities of the firm and the relevant information technologies. Today, most of these people work in specialized firms.

Developing, retaining and managing this type of scarce talent internally is now a major challenge for many of our clients, as is improving the overall marketing/enterprise IT relationship. Recently, we have been impressed by how consistently these themes have emerged across all six of the research projects that we currently have under way. Consider the following:

• Many of the opportunities identified in our Digital Game-Changer project – collaborative consumption, location-aware applications, reputation management, etc. – are primarily marketing issues.

• Our research into the future of the Retained IT Function shows that double-deep marketing/IT skills, especially analytics, are high on the list of IT core competencies that most firms believe they need to have in-house.

• The marketing department is the most frequent test area for Post-PC Era projects – experimenting with iPhones/Androids, tablets, Bring Your Own Technology, etc.

• As firms seek to find the right level of Information Transparency for their firm, the main source of tension typically stems from the potential marketing benefits of greater visibility and openness versus traditional business/IT concerns about confidentiality and data protection.

• Our Next Generation Identity and previous Digital Trust research emphasizes the marketing and brand benefits of addressing security issues traditionally seen as sources of potential loss.

• As we study today's Cloud Computing Leaders – Amazon, Google, etc. – how these firms manage their relationship with marketing will be an important area of focus.

For enterprise IT to have a vital role in the future of the firm, its overall relationship with marketing must be seen as effective, and IT must keep up with the ongoing surge in digital marketing innovation. Most marketing departments need close technology support, but if these groups continue to look elsewhere for such services, enterprise IT will face a significantly diminished future. In many firms it may be the single biggest factor shaping the long-term future of enterprise IT, which is why we will closely follow this topic in our future research projects and commentaries. But for now, the bottom line is that fully embracing the idea that IT is predominantly a medium is the first step toward becoming a modern information processing and/or marketing professional.