How agile are you?

From Scott Brinker’s essay accompanying these slides:

Gartner recently predicted that by 2017, the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO. As you might imagine, the reaction from many people in IT to that claim is, “What?!” Funny enough, the reaction from many people in marketing is the same: “What?!” It sounds like a prediction that the world we know will be completely turned upside down in 5 years. Can we believe that?

But the truth is, we’re seeing this happen already. At the Forrester CIO-CMO summit last year, I was in session where one CMO burst out in frustration, “I feel more like a CIO than a CMO! I have marketing automation, CRM, listening platforms — I’m up to my eyeballs in technology.”

Now, you might be asking yourself, “What does this have to do with agile?”

This convergence of marketing and technology is not a phenomenon of its own, so much as it is a symptom of our always-on, globally interconnected digital world. This new digital world didn’t happen overnight. It’s been the progress of the evolving Internet for the past 20 years. But it’s reached a tipping point where “online” no longer fits into a discrete box separate from our lives and our businesses. It’s now infused into the very bedrock of our lives and our businesses.

I believe this leads to two transformational mandates that every organization must face:

Everything is marketing.
Everyone must be agile.
These two mandates are intertwined. One begets the other in our interconnected world.

Let me clarify that by “agile,” I do mean little-a agile. Organizations and individuals must act and react with ever greater speed. We must be more prepared to adapt more quickly than ever before. That’s what I mean by everyone must be agile. But Big-A Agile methodologies help us achieve such agility, and to effectively scale agility, there must be method to the madness.

Read the rest of Scott’s excellent essay here, that fully explains this awesome slide deck. Agility is one of the things that humanizing your organization will help you to achieve. (More on that from Jamie shortly.)