How marketing technology, agile marketing, and Marissa Mayer are influencing the future org chart

An engineer turned CEO is a story that attracts attention.
The recent news that former Google engineer Marissa Mayer is filling the role of CEO at Yahoo! is a great example that traditional career paths in a functional silo are becoming a thing of the past. It should come as no surprise that company leaders today need to be well versed in both business and technical principles. It’s the result of the role of advancing technology and the digital world. Logically, it makes sense too. The most diverse leaders will be those with experience in multiple areas of the business.

But every career path doesn’t have to end with CEO.
The Real Story Group recognized the Rise of the Enterprise Marketing Technologist from recent research on the growing trend of digital marketing tool sets. A marketing technologist is a growing role in organizations even though they may have different titles the point is that the boundaries between marketing and technology continue to blur. Even my title is currently composed of “marketing technology”.

As I look back at the eCommerce organization mind map that I created, I can see the same concept there. Ecommerce management leaders have responsibility in software development, content management, merchandising, demand management, etc. Ecommerce is truly a melting pot of technology, sales, marketing, and operations.

Agile principles will further influence this trend.
Scott Brinker created a nifty diagram showing the Renaissance Career. The term may be a good description of the change that I believe will start to grow in the business world regarding career paths. That’s because the idea of agile development methodologies for software development is spreading to agile marketing methodologies.  Agile thinking values responsiveness over planning and focuses on interactions between functional areas more than passing large documents between them. Yeah, that means you might have the marketer and IT programmer at the same table. Lingos, language, and understanding will blend and blur.

This is good news for all of us. But what does it mean for “functional” departments in the company?
This means opportunity. It means rewards for those who seek to understand how technology solves business problems. For some it means advancing to an executive leadership role with more knowledge of how the enterprise operates. For others it means finding opportunities to serve in areas where they would not have ever imagined themselves.

Do you think this will lead to removal of functional groups in the enterprise such as marketing, IT, and sales? Will the future corporate department be organized around products and services more than the functional groups we know today? This means a more customer centric alignment rather than work type alignment. It allows the blending of our current functional roles into roles such as a marketing technologist.

Hmm. That would be a renaissance. What do you think?