Unanticipated demand, aging infrastructure, competing jurisdictions, and inadequate funding!  These descriptions best describe our country’s highway bridges. But for those of us who live to travel, we roll our eyes at infuriated amateurs who blame highway workers for delayed trips.  Yet how many of us blame the symptoms rather than root causes of business technology problems.  After thirty years of watching marketing dreams meet technical reality, here are some observations of why it is so hard to translate marketing programs through technology.

Today’s typical scenario
• A goal-driven entrepreneur or marketing manager defines a program they wish to implement using technology
• Next a project manager is assigned to translate these needs into a project work plan and
• Finally, a programmer is assigned to write the code and connect it to the needed databases and communication/delivery systems to bring the project to fruition. 

If it’s so simple, why doesn’t this work?  Here’s why. 
• The entrepreneur/marketing manager has been promised that in this day and age anything is possible and all they have to do is ask. 
• The project manager, especially if he/she is billing the client for their time, eagerly attacks a complicated project arriving at an enormous work plan and budget accommodating every need and want they heard. 
• The programmer, formerly a $100 an hour domestic worker, and now often a $20 an hour third world programmer, is presented with a giant work plan hopefully leveraging his or her ability to generate accurate code at break neck speed. 

Inherent in this virtual relay race are missed handoffs. 

• The marketer assumes the project manager understands his or her business. 
• The project manager quickly realizes the marketer doesn’t understand or care about the complexity of what they are requesting or the sophistication of the technology that it will take.
• Similarly, the project manager faces translation challenges on the coding level with a volume-driven technician who increasingly has to overcome a language and cultural barrier. 
Isn’t it a miracle that programs are ever completed satisfactorily or to return to our highway bridge metaphor, most don’t collapse? 

Looking forward

After decades of watching capabilities increase, costs drop and expectations soar, successful marketing through technology is as tough as ever.  Here are a few lessons I’ve learned the hard way.
1. Entrepreneurs and marketers need to understand when and why their requests are easy, hard, time-consuming and unreasonable.
2. Project managers need to understand how and why the marketing manager and his/her program is successful
3. The programmer needs to understand what the project really has to accomplish.

In summary

There is more pressure than ever on all parties to communicate, understand and translate what they are trying to do into what someone else is depending on being done.  Like “smart” bridges that absorb, convert and transfer weight, seismic shifts and weather, successful entrepreneurs, marketers, project managers and programmers have to be as good as handling similar “shocks” as they are at doing their specific jobs.

Recently I was hosting a session of my Rainmaker Roundtable, a select group of entrepreneurs who sell services to other owners, on the topic of professional integrity and ethics. With their input and my further thinking, here are my three conclusions.

1. Know exactly who your client is and always serve them best. For example, if your client is the firm and the owner is a destructive influence as its president, you have the duty to do what is best for the company up to and including removing the president so the owner and the company will thrive.
2. Be true to how you make money and don’t compromise. For example, if you make money dispensing unbiased advice, don’t take a commission recommending a vendor who provides what you just prescribed
3. Always practice transparency unless it compromises confidentiality. For example, if you will make money, benefit, or be placed in a compromising position by learning or knowing some information, tell the person providing the information why, beware ,or to stop. And when the information comes from your client, (See #1 above) it is absolutely confidential.

What do you think?