As marketing continues a steady adaptation into a technology-based discipline, particularly with the explosive growth and usage of marketing automation tools, marketers are finding strange company with the IT teams of their respective companies. But marketing and IT are not two groups who have a long history of working closely together to deploy systems that impact the company. It is widely known that marketing was working on the sidelines of the core IT infrastructure – procuring low-cost point solutions on a departmental credit card and patching these tools together with excel spreadsheets – but those days are long gone. Marketing automation is the driver for the shift from point solutions to enterprise-class IT for the marketing department. In particular, the ability and importance for marketing automation platforms to integrate into other front-office systems, such as CRM and website, is forcing marketing and IT to work closely together on evaluating and implementing these systems. More often than not, though, marketing and IT don’t know how to work together in a productive, cohesive manner. IT and sales, by comparison, have been at it since the early ’90s with the advent of enterprise CRM systems. At the time, the two departments were forced to collaborate due to the need to integrate CRM with ERP. Now it’s marketing’s turn. To highlight a key difference on how marketing thinks differently than IT, consider how buying decisions for marketing automation differ. Marketing will, more often than not, select the tool that has specific features that match exactly with how they are accustomed to working. Looking more specifically at email design, marketers will almost always gravitate to a MAP that presents an email designer that looks, feels and behaves like the designer they had been using in the lower cost email tool. IT, on the other hand, will be concerned with how well the MAP integrates with CRM. Is the integration pre-built by the vendor, does it leverage common API language, does it leverage middleware? So how can marketing and IT get along better? Marketing can start by understanding the nature of how IT buys, understand their language, and what makes them tick. Maybe being able to discuss the differences between Captain Kirk and Piccard is not necessary but the point is, to get along better, and work more productively, marketing should understand more about why IT’s role is critical in marketing tech purchases. Before a marketing department embarks on a project to purchase and implement a marketing automation system, it is recommended to have a sit down with the CIO and members of the IT team to understand some of their key criteria for purchasing and implementing an integrated software package. Integrating with CRM being a critical requirement for most MAPs today, it would require marketing to involve IT early, as they are likely more in tune with peripheral systems that are certified to work with the core CRM. Many IT pros attend the CRM shows and know which apps have spent the time and money to certify themselves to work with the CRM.