Strategic Legal Technology 
Corporate information technology is shifting from chief information officers to chief marketing officers. Should large law firm CIOs pay attention to this trend?
Gartner reports that by 2017, the CMO will control more tech spending than the CIO. In response, IBM “is making a point of targeting” the CMO. So reports the Wall Street Journal in As Economy Cools, IBM Furthers Focus on Marketers (18 July 2012). Driving this trend is a shift from PCs for personal productivity to systems that can boost revenue “by tracking customers across channels and better targeting offers and advertising.”
Consumer mass marketing and social media drives the corporate IT shift to marketing. Large law firms are purely business-to-business (B2B) so operate in a different environment. Yet they too need to drive revenue growth. Doing so today is hard with legal demand flat and competition increasing. So law firm marketing tech spend may need to go up. I have not seen marketing IT spend trend data but the emergence of marketing technology positions at many large firms suggests it is already up.
Assuming BigLaw marketing IT spend continues to increase, what role should the CIO play? Ideally, CIOs should be deeply involved. At the moment, however, their hands are full. I reported recently that platform upgrades, software migrations, mobility, and security consume CIOs today (see my April 2012 post, What’s Keeping BigLaw CIOs Busy?, reporting on the Hildebrandt CIO Forum).
I see four factors that likely will keep BigLaw CIOs focused on infrastructure: First, law firms have a higher percent of IT-intensive knowledge workers than most of corporate America. Second, law firms support a large number of niche software applications. Third, firms have a larger number of small offices relative to most companies. And fourth, lawyers are demanding and firm owners show up to work every day - IT problems are more obvious than if marketing fails to achieve its full potential.
It will be interesting to see, as marketing IT spend increases, what the relative roles of the CIO and CMO will be.
Ron, I wonder if sometimes people put too much stock in titles. Both CIO and CMO are support-management roles, and thus, to at least some extent, their duties might be more fungible than the titles suggest. I’ve known a few CIOs of F100 corporations who have greater competence in marketing than technology, for example. After all, think what the “I” in CIO represents; isn’t information in part a marketing attribute?
I’m not truly suggesting that CIOs and CMOs should suddenly switch places at the dance, but it’s important to think about support in a more general context beyond specific titles.
Comment by Steven B. Levy, author of Legal Project Management 7/22/2012 @ 2:41 pm
I am not surprised to see this trending this way.
Comment by Peter Ozolin 7/22/2012 @ 5:03 pm
Ron, as Marketing Technology spending increases, a key factor to launching successful projects will be hiring people who understand both legal technology and marketing’s goals. I see a bright future for Marketing Technology Managers and others who can bridge the gap between lawyers, IT and marketing.
Comment by Cindy Thurston Bare 7/24/2012 @ 8:36 am