Genuinely, this absorbed my attention and I knew so little about it that I had to look up what the initials stood for. CMO is Chief Marketing Officer and CIO is Chief Information Officer. Probably every corporation has them but allegedly most corporations don't have them working together very much at all.
But I was very tickled by how this piece pointed out a truly gigantic change that has happened with these jobs. It used to be that marketing people were a bit vague and nebulous, they had ideas but you coudn't really test them before doing them. It used to be that technology people in a company were the ones who knew how things could be done, what they would cost and what exact impact it would have.
Today marketing people have so much detail about customers that they can and they do model things like price changes and they know what the outcome will be. Whereas IT people are the ones who can't predict how much budgets will go over, who can't guarantee security and whose great work is undone by every member of staff who brings in an Android phone.
This Macworld piece is about Liz Allen, a former Apple marketing exec who has followed this change over the years and has a lot to say about it. I tell you, I was reading her comments on my phone as I raced around. Didn't have time to stop and read it properly yet couldn't help myself grabbing the next few seconds to read a bit more.