At the SIPA marketing conference in Miami I gave a presentation with that title. The presentation is based on my own experience as well as quite a few interviews with marketing and IT professionals.

Some of the slides might not make sense on their own (like the ones about the bicycles), but if you’re interested in viewing the slides, here you go.

Slides for What marketing needs to know about IT.

And feel free to post questions.

So … about those bikes.

There are lots of things that you think you know — like what a bicycle looks like — but when you have to get down to details, you often miss some important things. Not because you’re stupid, but because that’s how your brain works.

People make funny mistakes when they try to describe simple, everyday things. For example, when some people draw bicycles, they’ll connect the chain to the front and back wheels, or forget the seat, or something like that.

The relevance to “what marketing needs to know about IT” is that you can’t give an engineer a half-baked drawing of a bike and say “build this” any more than you can give IT a half-baked web concept and expect them to make it happen. It doesn’t work.

The two drawings in my slides are from two helpful marketing professionals, and they actually did pretty well. But there are some minor problems. See if you can spot them.

And here’s something else, just for fun. I wish I’d had it for my presentation.