By all accounts, mobile app usage has significant traction. The challenge enterprise marketers face, though, is how to leverage that traction in meaningful ways.

Arms flailing in an ocean of customer data, panicky marketers need the CIO to throw them a life line. That is, they need to know what to do with the data.

Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars (or more) promoting their brand, trying to create a positive image. Yet often they treat customer support, which can be a customer's first point of contact with the company, as a necessary evil. Many businesses make it difficult for customers to get the help they need -- creating a negative impression.

Forget the territorial battles being fought at other companies between marketing and technology executives. At renowned athletic gear maker Adidas Group, the digital marketing approach is built on a real alliance between the two disciplines.

If a CMO signs contracts with ad networks and tag management vendors that collect user data, essentially giving third-parties access to the company website, the CIO had better be involved. When the site slows down or online customers start receiving sales-killing content warnings or security gaps widen, the CMO will be lost and confused in the Tower of techno-Babel.

In exchange for discounts from their favorite companies, people will like corporate Facebook pages, fill out surveys and join mailing lists. But power companies have to get their customers to do more than that.

Microsoft is poised to release a major update to its Dynamics CRM and marketing applications in a bid to gain market share against rivals such as Salesforce.com.

IBM hopes to expand its customer base and sell to executives outside of IT, including marketers, with a new set of consulting services that can be bought online with a credit card.

The lines between IT and marketing are blurring in the age of digital marketing. For that reason, it's more important than ever that CIOs and CMO communicate consistently and effectively. To examine this evolving relationship as it pertains to big data in particular, CIO.com partnered with CMO.com to produce this report.

In today's business environment, organizations are increasingly demanding advanced analytics that allow them to use large volumes and diverse types of data to discover patterns and anomalies and predict outcomes.

Depending up on how you look at it, crowdsourcing is all the rage these days -- think Wikipedia, X Prize and Kickstarter -- or at the other extreme, greatly underused.

Startup WibiData has launched a platform aimed at giving marketing teams and data scientists the means to create highly personalized retail shopping experiences.

The desire to make better decisions faster is one of the fundamental drivers of new big data analytics technologies and a general push toward data-driven decision-making. But the relationship between data and intuition -- the old 'gut feeling' -- is a complicated one, says Peter Swabey, senior editor, technology at the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the research and analysis division of The Economist Group.

Liz Allen, a former Apple marketing executive, has seen the volatile relationship between CMOs and CIOs evolving over the years. CMOs were worshipped and CIOs despised at Apple, but Allen isn't taking sides: 'If you're at odds, your competition is going to win.'

Argos has seen a 45 percent increase in the number of registered customers in its database after launching a ‘My account' function across its online channels.

Two of Microsoft's top executives will leave the company, including its head of marketing and the former CEO of Skype.

Business leaders are "over-confident" about the speed at which their organisations are responding to technology-led change, according to research from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).

After spending billions to acquire a series of marketing-related software companies, Oracle is now undergoing the process of creating a unified suite it can take to battle against competing offerings from the likes of Salesforce.com and Microsoft.

Starbucks' CEO Howard Schultz is adding a focus on innovation to his remit as the company makes digital one of the business's key drivers.

A quarter of large global organisations will appoint a chief data officer (CDO) by the end of the year, a Gartner analyst has claimed.

Tired of waiting for lengthy approval processes, CMOs have been doing end-runs around the IT department for years. In turn, scorned CIOs would rip out the marketing department's rogue tech.