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Where is the branded equivalent of Snapchat? Where is the enterprise version of the vanishing-photo app with which iPhone users sent over one billion vanishing photos in just one year? We ask this not because brands should be in the business of sexting, but because, five years after the launch of the Apple App Store, the watershed moment that gave business entrée to the defining gadget of the 21St century, the enterprise has yet to really crack the code on mobile development.

Snapchat. Instagram. Words With Friends. Draw Something. What’s App. It seems like a new app goes viral every week, giving some previously unknown dudes in co-op workspace a valuation beyond their wildest dreams. For brands trying to figure out the mobile space, the opposite has been true. Despite entering the mobile game with massive consumer awareness and trust, big companies have had a difficult time getting consumers to welcome them on to their Android and iOS devices.

Back in 2011, Deloitte found that 80 percent of branded apps struggled to get even 1,000 downloads. That was a grim headline for

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mobile marketing operations and, over time, there’s not much to suggest things have changed. Breakout branded apps—and we’re excluding those created by media companies that have an unfair leg up over marketers of dog food and insurance policies—are still few and far between. How many do you download only to delete them a day later when it comes up short on form or functionality? You know, the airline app that won’t allow you to book a flight; the rental car app

that’s just a link to the company website that—curses!—isn’t optimized for mobile and won’t remember your 23-digit user number; the diaper brand doohickey that doesn’t do, well, anything. Can you name five branded apps you use regularly? How about three—and we’ll spot you Nike and Starbucks? The same goes for apps developed for employees. The app stores are

littered with poorly-reviewed and little-used apps that were meant to help out folks who take orders, make sales, and generally keep the enterprise rolling.

The point is this: For even the most sophisticated companies, mobile app strategy remains a work in progress. Big budgets, flashy agencies and development shops, and enormous amounts of customer data all have done little to make a dent in the consumer apathy. What’s to blame? Well, you have to remember the mobile revolution is only five years in the making. It naturally takes enterprises some time to figure out the realm of the possible and then make it happen.

But let’s not let enterprises totally off the hook. It’s fair to say that too many have tripped over their own feet as they’ve struggled to organize around mobile. A case in point is lingering ambiguity around a central organizational question: Who should own mobile app strategy? The CMO, served by an increasingly left-brained marketing department

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and an ever growing array of agencies? Or should the CIO, the tradi-tional buyer of technology and maintainer of servers and intranet, rule the roost?

That’s the question we’ve asked a number of leading thinkers to ponder in this eBook. The answer matters in no small part because marketing and IT come with two very different sets of baggage. If either side is to win the mobile game they’ll have to change and become more like the other.

Our book’s structure is simple. First we’ll discuss the respective cases for the CMO, and CIO before concluding with some ways that eschew those legacy power struggles. The case study there is a company you might have heard of—Walmart. We begin our study with the C-suite denizen who at this moment time—and if you blink, it might change—seems to be sitting in the catbird seat.

CIO CmO

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When we caught up with Amy Kavanaugh in early March, the VP-public affairs and engagement at Taco Bell was still in the whirlwind of a new product launch. The lustily-awaited Cool Ranch Doritos Locos Taco had arrived in stores a day later than expected and the fast food equiva-lent of a riot erupted around the internet. The new menu item is the next beefy/cheesy chapter in what’s turning out to be a storybook marriage between Taco Bell and Frito Lay. It’s already yielded the Doritos Locos taco, an historic product launch that sold at a rate of almost one million per day in 2012. Riding its spicy shell, the Yum Brands brand has become the fast feeder to watch as it plans to open 2,000 new restaurants over the next decade. Things are moving <em> muy rapido</em> at Taco Bell and the mobile experience is no excep-tion.

“Agile is our middle name,” said Kavanaugh, referring to the project development methodology preferred by many top software compa-nies and, increasingly, on corporate campuses far from Silicon Valley. Taco Bell, which offers a fairly basic app with store locator and gift

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card functionality as well as menu and nutritional informational, is now in preliminary testing of a mobile ordering experience and has just signed an agreement with Cardfree, the mobile merchant platform. Why? Mobile ordering is what the consumer wants and Taco Bell, according to Kavanaugh, has made the shift from an advertising-led company to an insights-led one.

That shift means one thing for mobile app strategy. “If you’re driving an insights brand and responding to and co-creating experience with consumers and identifying their needs, then this is a function that should sit in marketing.”

Kavanaugh is part of a growing chorus that favors a marketing-led mobile app strategy. Market-ters, the argument goes, own the consumer insights and the brand experience, and therefore should oversee the increasingly important mobile app channel. But bearing this responsibility augurs a new reality for marketing departments. They have to become more tech-savvy and comfortable with building and maintaining a rigorous development roadmap. Suddenly they’re making software—a long way from the days when marketing was all about outsourcing ad campaigns to Madison Ave agencies.

“When I started in marketing, it was the arts and crafts department,” said Brian Kardon, CMO of Lattice Engines, which offers big data analytics for sales and marketing departments. “We did the logos, the colors of the website, the branding. Now it’s all left brain. Everyone on my team is a digital native. They know about HTML, search, how to build an app. Increasingly in bigger companies you have marketing technologists embedded.”

“Suddenly they’re making software—a long way from the days when marketing was all about outsourcing ad campaigns to Madison Ave agencies. ”

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The rise of the marketing technologist—or creative technologist in many an agency’s lingo—shows just how far we’ve come in blurring the lines between what used to be two very distinct departments, skillsets, and worldviews. The marketing department needs people who get tech—and vice versa.

Scott Brinker, CTO at Ion Interactive and proprietor of the ChiefMarTech blog, has been studying this dynamic for years. He believes that “market-ing has to own the experience and to do that they have to take responsib-lility for the technology.”It’s logical that marketing is respon-sible for mobile app strategy, but this comes with a caveat that echoes throughout many of the other

conversations we had. Marketers have to earn it by really immersing their organizations in technology.

“I don’t think it works when marketing sketches out the experience and throws it over the fence for IT or some third party to build,” he said. “Marketing folks don’t even know what’s possible with the tech-nology just as tech folks might not understand how it impacts experi-ence. You need someone on the team who speaks both languages.”

Who marketers partner with is another important factor in how successful they’ll be in owning mobile. Forrester analyst Michael Facemire observed that the digital agencies once best known for design acumen are getting better at working with backend technology, helping apps with sharply-designed front ends add more functionality and value through connections with the vast amounts of data present in the enterprise. The association could help CMOs gain tech credibil-ity.

“The CMO is trying to branch out and not just be about pretty pictures

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anymore,” Facemire said. “I can reach out and work with folks who have technical chops, who are not just pretty-picture guys but can work with back-end systems as well. This can become a common ground.”

Another common ground can be Agile development, the project management philosophy that may end up being the Esperanto of a properly integrated marketing-tech world, only, unlike Espe-eranto, people actually use it.

At Mindjet, the San Francisco-based creator of work manage-ement software, the marketingdepartment has adopted a version of Agile that has them operating in three-week sprints. “When we sit down with an engineering team, we’re more effective because we all speak the same language,” said Mindjet CMO Jascha Kaykas-Wolff.

Adopting Agile is part and parcel of the changes that have washed over the marketing business that as for decades acclimated to long planning cycles and communications strategies that were hatched behind closed doors and shoved out into the world with little if any room adapting to customer feedback.

Agile is about fast sprints, testing and learning, iterating and reiterat-ing. Said Kaykas-Wolff, “The idea of having a big campaign, pumping a bunch of media against and then pulling it down six months later doesn’t really work. You have to operate differently and one of the models to pull from is software deployment.”

To his mind, marketers shouldn’t be automatically handed responsibil-ity for mobile. They have to earn it by educating themselves and

“Adopting Agile is part and parcel of the changes that have washed over the marketing business...”

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showing that they get how software is made rather than try important ways of thinking and doing from old marketing models.

“If you approach mobile strategy like it's a bunch of campaigns you’re destined for failure. You have to be empathetic to how you develop and deploy software. If you're not, then you're in a horrible position to raise your hand to take over mobile strategy.”

Until about eight months ago, Mindjet’s mobile operations was led by the product team. Now it’s organized by a steering committee for mobile comprised of a number of senior executives including the head of product and Kaykas-Wolff. Injecting marketing and other functions into the mobile development process ensured that Mindjet began to better focus on its paying customers and even led to a new product.

Over time, Kaykas-Wolff said marketing may end up owning app strategy. Or it may not. In any event, ownership doesn’t preclude collaboration with other parts of the enterprise, least of all IT. And, no matter the organization, there are things that IT just does better.

“There are requirements in terms of privacy protection and security-things that I would have no business being involved in,” Kavanaugh said. “They are important for brand and consumer protection. That is driven by the back-end, a really strong IT team and partnership.”

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There’s good news and bad news for the CIO who wants to own mobile strategy. Let’s get the bad news out of the way.

Mobile success requires speed and openness to a more iterative way of doing things. With mobile, you’re constantly issuing updates, optimizing, perfecting and innovating. Unfortunately, CIOs and the IT organizations they oversee are historical symbols of corporate slow-ness. You don’t look to IT for innovation. You look to IT to keep things up and running.

“The office of the CIO was never thought of as an innovation center,” said Facemire, of Forrester. “It’s been perceived as a cost center hoping to get stuff done at a containable cost.”

This is a perception that, rightly or wrongly, has lingered. Most people we talked to don’t think that your average CIO is cut out for the job, a number that includes some of their own.

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“I'm heavily biased that the marketer should own it,” said Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, a marketing SaaS company based in Cambridge, Mass. “IT is there to help the business. IT should help with the build-out or with sourcing the engineering development, but only at the direction of the CMO. The legacy power struggles need to go away.

Here’s the good news. There are indications that CIOs are taking on a broader role within their organiza-tions, that they are no longer mere shepherds of a just-say-slow IT department. A 2012 survey from Gartner captured the change roiling this geeky corner of the C-suite. Seventy-seven percent of CIOs interviewed said they have responsi-bilities beyond IT, compared to just

50 percent four years before. IT management, until recently the be-all and end-all of the job, now ranks a paltry sixth on a list of priorities that’s topped by analytics and business intelligence and mobile tech-nologies. Sure, CIOs are still called upon to oversee security, virtualiza-tion, CRM and legacy modernization, but they’re increasingly tasked with building new channels and markets.

Chris Silva, an analyst at Altimeter Group, breaks the recent history of the CIO role into three phases. In the first, the CIO intensely focused on his own backlog and lost track of what consumers were doing tech-wise. This was followed by a period of disintermediation during which enterprises went with line of business-led initiatives that often ended up with purchases off-the-shelf solutions. We’re just entering a third phase that’s a result of dissatisfaction of those solutions. And we’re playing catch up to consumers.

“I haven't been able to quantify this in data points, but over the past six months or so the tide is shifting back toward the CIO,” Silva told us. “CIOs are caught up. They know what’s needed: building platforms

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across the organization so that everyone can benefit from mobile in a way that’s consistent and fully funded and resourced.”

Facemire said this is changing how CIOs think of their jobs. “The CIO,” he said, “is trying to pivot and become the chief digital officer and become the center of not only information but of digital interaction.”

And of course there’s no way to think of digital interaction without thinking of mobile. With the number of mobile devices set to exceed the world’s population, we’re not going out on a limb in saying that understanding mobile is a key part of the CIO’s future. But how can he or she put an elbow to the ribs of the CMO humble-bragging about how he owns consumer insights and user experience?

The CIO does hold one card here: the employee. It’s important to not forget that an important user base for apps is to be found in the workforce and the CIO has, for a long time now, been charged with designing a technology experience just for that audience. As workers of all kinds—from salespeople to community managers to waiters-get more mobile, they need devices that combine the friendly interaceof a consumer product with the back-end functionality that allows them to dip into enterprise systems where necessary.

Happily, the CIO has already been trying to make this marriage happen as he confronts the consumerization of IT, which, put simply, means what technology an employee uses in the workplace will be informed by the choices he makes as a consumer. Although you might issue staff a Blackberry, Dell Inspiron and an Outlook account,

“With the number of mobile devices set to exceed the world’s population, we’re not going out on a limb in saying that understanding mobile is a key part of the CIO’s future”

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employees are actually using an Android, an iPad and Gmail. It’s a trend that has any number of implications for HR, IT and legal depart-ments. One effect of the Bring Your Own Device phenomenon is that it’s forced CIOs to better understand how workforces use technology and that’s a good first step to understanding what consumers are doing. It’s given topics like good design and usability a higher profile.

Another advantage that CIOs also bring is a different mindset to bear when it comes to metrics. In the worst cases, marketers can get snagged on soft but sexy metrics—say the number of reviews and stars in the App Store—and lose sight of bigger questions.

“IT shouldn't give up on metrics like security or process support simply to serve marketers'

metrics,” said Altimeter’s Silva. “You can take great expertise from serving customers and use 90 percent of that, but serving customers is probably going to be different from serving folks internally. Are you solving a user problem? If you're not or you're not focused on that, you're wasting your time and your money.”

Among the keys to success for the CIO, according to one information chief who prefers to remain anonymous, is not leading with technol-ogy and speaking the language of business objectives. Hiring IT people with broad technology stack knowledge who can sit comfortably next to marketing and design people on cross-functional teams also helps—as does a mindset that allows innovation to flourish through-out the organization.

Even an empowered CIO is faced with an unfortunate reality: no matter how expansively you view your role, a good chunk of the job is

“IT shouldn’t give up on metrics like security or process support simply to serve marketers’ metrics”

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about keeping the operation running and managing an endless project list. To a degree, this CIO remains a service provider who doesn’t wholly control her own agenda. Innovation is often far down the list unless there’s a budget set aside for it. But that doesn’t mean innova-tion isn’t going on elsewhere in the organization—in other corporate functions or at the business units. When that happens, what’s a CIO to do? Snuff it out and stay true to a command-and-control notion of IT or let so-called shadow IT bloom?

The answer to some degree is a barometer of how well this CIO is cut out to run mobile app strategy and other operations that are inher-ently forward-thinking.

“Fighting this sort of shadow IT is not a prescription for success,” said our anonymous CIO. “I allow it to thrive and allow seedlings to hatch out in the business units. It’s an effective backdoor way for me to fund and create innovation. I don’t blow the whistle, or stomp my feet. I nurture it and advocate for it. Ultimately that's going to come back to me. It will come under my ownership. I’m better served in leading from behind.”

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Ben Galbraith laughed lightly as he states his position on our CMO-CIO question.

“I'm an engineer by background, so my response is predictable,” said the VP-global products at Walmart.com. “I struggle to see why giving a marketing guy control over a software product makes any sense at all.”

After dismantling our entire thesis, Galbraith was kind enough to walk through the logic with us. It kind of felt like making a guy used to driving a Porsche take your pre-owned Hyundai out for a test spin. You see, Walmart does things differently than most Fortune 100 whose roots aren’t in technology. A company that began in the final year of the Second World War has made itself into a tech player, establishing Walmart Global eCommerce, which in the company’s own words “combines the small structure and nimble nature of a startup with the resources of the world’s largest retailer.” In short, Global eCommerce supplies the ginormous retailer’s business units with software solutions. You’ve probably read about Walmart Labs, the incubator

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behind innovations like Polaris, the company’s own search engine.

“We’re very much a software technology operation,” Galbraith said, making a crucial observation. Fashioning yourself a software company means you’re relentlessly focused on innovation and, rather than

worry about old organizational silos, you’re keeping the consumer at the center of things. It also means that discussion around how legacy roles can be updated doesn’t much apply.

“For us,” Galbraith said, “the notion of marketing people owning the software is ridiculous but it's as ridiculous as the IT people owning the software.”

So the CMO or CIO question is no longer really a relevant one, though as recently as two years ago it might have been because Walmart.com had fewer product people in its ranks. Now, he said, “the answer to the question on both sides is no. We need someone who's focused on end-to-end customer experience. For us it's actually two people. One who's focused on it from a business perspective and one who's focused on it from a product perspective.”

Asked whether this sort of thing is feasible for companies smaller than Walmart–which is to say almost every company in the world–Galbraith acknowledged the efficiencies that Walmart gets from itsglobal girth. It’s easier to amortize the R&D when you’re a global player. Before you sniff that what’s good for Bentonville can’t help your own 25-person shop, remember that there are still lessons here that are universally applicable. The first is that laser focus on the customer and her needs and desires. The second is putting software people in charge of software development. This is what is really behind those calls for more a technologically-savvy marketing depart-ment.

BEFORE AFTER

Acme C

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In the final analysis, it may end up that Walmart’s experience is more widely applicable than you might think. That’s not to say your small or medium enterprise is going to find a pot of gold that will allow you to plow untold millions into proprietary software development. Even if you’re still buying off-the-shelf—something Galbraith said Walmart would do more of if only off-the-shelf was better—there’s a point to be made here. In the end, neither marketing nor tech has to end up owning mobile. It is not preordained. And a lot of companies are talking about cross-functional constructions that include not only the marketing and tech but also legal, HR and other functions where need be.

“The CIO and the CMO are in the best case ceding their power in equal amounts to a center of excellence that is comprised of resources from both shops, ideally, that is leading mobile throughout the organiza-tion,” said Altimeter’s Chris Silva. “They’re doing the work and acting as a tiger team, asking how do we make sure we're doing it right and how are we cross-pollinating what we're doing on the inside? They've realized building the wheel five times doesn't help anybody.”

Perhaps the CIO vs. CMO smackdown shouldn’t be a smackdown at all. “You’ve got to take the versus out,” said Taco Bell’s Kavanaugh, speak-ing like a true purveyor of Doritos-Taco Bell mash-ups. “Nothing works in isolation anymore.”

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Matt Creamer is a writer and editor based in New York City. He has written for Ad Age, where he is editor at large, The Awl, The Atlantic, the New York Daily News, The New York Observer and other publica-tions. He tweets at @matt_creamer.

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Jake McKibben & Miguel Gaydosh

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