Leadership News, Features, and Interviews

How do you choose the right software (or app) for your organisation? How do you sort through the sales hype? And how can you tell which vendor will be with you for the long haul and which will disappear after the sale?

ANZ Stadium is in the midst of its biggest sporting year since the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Driving customer engagement with this historic array of content along with digital transformation are key for new marketing chief, Melinda Madigan.

During the IBM Smarter Analytics conference in Sydney this month, four of its key session speakers from Australia Post, IBM consulting,Telstra and American Express closed off the day by outlining their top tips for improving your approach to data analytics.

Over the past three years, the buzz around big data has continued to grow. While some dismiss it as so much hype, businesses around the world are taking notice: In its recently released 5th annual Digital IQ Survey, consulting firm PwC found 62 per cent of respondents believe big data can give them a competitive advantage.

When I was at IBM, I spent some time in the Executive Resource program, which is designed specifically to prepare someone to be a CEO. The program includes classes by top executives and military officers who either were CEOs themselves or were on the short path to becoming a CEO.

The majority of CMOs and CIOs recognise the importance of building a relationship with each other as big data opens up and challenges their company’s customer knowledge, a new survey claims.

Big data has arrived as a big business initiative. But the hip, experimental, ad hoc veneer of blending data streams to surface bold discoveries belies a massive cultural and technological undertaking not every organisation is ready for.

Just how did Steve Jobs and Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com fame become the gurus of creative thinking? Were they born with an inherent talent, or can you in fact learn to become a leading marketing innovator?

Greg Smith is The Co-op's first CMO in its 55-year history. It's no wonder his to-do list stretches a mile and includes everything from brochures to outlet transformations, Facebook strategies and more.

CMOs need to create an analytical framework and master data management strategy, as well as build an insight-based team, if they’re to successfully do the job confronting them today, a new report claims.

Working with and making business decisions based on data is good for your company's bottom line. Companies that have embraced a data-driven culture--rating themselves substantially ahead of their peers in their use of data--are three times more likely to rate themselves as substantially ahead of their peers in financial performance, according to findings by the Economist Intelligence Unit in a survey sponsored by Tableau Software.

Marketers who bypass their own IT department are missing an opportunity to invest in more worthwhile brand activities, OpenText’s CMO claims.

It’s a wonderful time to be leading as CMO - assuming you’re up to the challenge. As companies face growing pressure to drive growth in this unpredictable environment, marketing is increasingly on your CEO’s agenda and, rest assured, it is being hotly debated in the boardroom, as well.

The average tenure of a CMO has risen dramatically in recent years, and is seen by many to signify a CMO’s legitimacy to ultimately taking the top job: CEO.

Given her solid background in the software and telecoms space, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn PGi’s marketing chief Melissa Wong is a passionate believer in CMOs embracing technology. What will arguably raise more eyebrows is that she doesn’t like to be called a marketer.

The CMO has finally arrived. It might have taken five years to get there and involved a radical transformation of marketing as a practical function and principle, but the CMO has officially become a leader of corporate strategy.

Technology is infiltrating all aspects of marketing, regardless of whether you see it as a good or bad thing. The questions is, how does the average CMO keep on top of it all?

Gartner’s report on the decline of the CIO and rise of the marketer as the key technology buyer made plenty of waves last year. According to the analyst group, 35 per cent of enterprise IT expenditure by 2015 will be out of the CIO’s hands, with CMOs responsible for the majority of technology purchasing by 2017.