When I attended the CDO Summit earlier this year I finally understood the true meaning of digital: The application of marketing techniques to all phases of technology adoption.
When I looked around me at the meeting, which was full of people who were Chief Digital Officers (CDOs) or who were aspirants to that role, it was clear this was a different type of gathering. At an O’Reilly Conference you get a eclectic mix of people from the tech hipster with the tight fitting t-shirt and tattoos, to the deep nerd in comfortable clothes from vendors or Threadless, to the expensively dressed down VC, to the sales staff and CEOs in business suits. The CDO Summit was full of people who were in business casual or suits.
During the presentations it hit me: Everyone is talking about basic principles of marketing. Segmentation, positioning, promotion, and so forth. The only difference was that instead of marketing a product, the CDOs were interested in marketing the application of technology.
Rachel Haot, Chief Digital Officer and Deputy Secretary of Technology for New York State, was the star of the CDO Summit in NYC in April, 2014. She was named CDO of the Year in honor of her work for New York State and her previous role as CDO of New York City under the
In telling several stories about her activities, Haot explained how she helped people understand who their customers are and how they used technology. She explained how she helped people understand the personals of the people they were serving. Once they started looking, some surprising facts arose, for example, that the use of social media by low-income clients of social service agencies was quite high. This made the relevant department realize that social media could be an effective way of getting the word out about policies and programs.
Once the audience was understood, then different products needed to be developed. In this part of the CDO role, Haot was more like a consultant than a CDO. She was recommending ways to assemble solutions with minimal development, not attempting to build applications from scratch.
Then, for the adoption phase promotional techniques were recommended. In other words, a marketing strategy to get users to adopt the new products and services. Apigee Institute, which has been focusing much of its research on the transformative role of CDOs, found in a recent study that this outward focus on customers and users is a key to success.
"Our survey research with 800 large companies in 8 countries shows that technology organizations describing themselves as 'outside in' are markedly more effective than those that don't," says Bryan Kirschner, Director of the Apigee Institute. "We see concrete examples of this among our customers: senior IT directors who are out publicly managing their company's technical brand so they can attract top talent, or developers who are passionate and about observing user behavior so they can iterate on apps based on first-hand knowledge, rather than requirements documents.”
I’m going to be exploring this topic in more detail on a panel entitled “Digital transformation beyond the bits: the keys to turning technology into business advantage” at Apigee’s I Love APIs conference on September 8 through 10.
I see the marketing aspects of Haot’s experience repeated over and over in other CDOs. Applications of all sorts have become far easier to create. Those who play the hands on role of the CDO or the portfolio management role of the CIO generally are not sophisticated when it comes to being sensitive and empathetic to the needs of their customers. The CDO is essentially filling that role by bringing marketing skills to the task. That’s why the real meaning of digital is marketing.
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Dan Woods is CTO and editor of CITO Research, a publication where early adopters find technology that matters. For more stories like this one visit www.CITOResearch.com. Dan has performed research for Apigee.
