If not, why not?  Just because you are a marketer?  How then, do you talk to IT people in a language they can (partially) understand and get anything done?  How will you increase the Productivity of your marketing efforts without having a useful dialogue with IT?  If you can’t increase the Productivity of your programs and deliver better results, what will happen is your job will be “absorbed into the Network”, as Regis McKenna would say.

If you are in Marketing Management and are looking for a seat at the strategic table you have to understand some of this stuff.  The CEO, COO, and CFO do; why not you?

At least try to read these magazines:

Intelligent Enterprise – the data / architecture side of Marketing Productivity; Business Intelligence, Data Modeling

Optimize Magazine – More about Business Process Stuff; Modeling, Management, Sensing and Alerting, Six Sigma

BaseLine Magazine – This provides hard core, detailed case studies on Business Optimization.  Amazing stuff, hard to believe they get execs to fess up to some of these giant productivity disasters.  Mostly focuses on operations, but why is operations not of your concern?  Operations impacts the customer, the customer is your main focus (right?).  When you read these cases, imagine how these customer-touchpoint disasters affected the outcome of every marketing program running at the company.

DM Review – this one can be some tough sledding, a lot of it is about systems, but hey, how long are you not going to care about systems?

You will not understand everything these magazines are talking about (especially the last one), but that’s not the point.  The point is to learn what they are talking about, and try to figure out how you can take advantage of it when it happens.

Heck, even help it happen or make sure it happens in a way that is the most productive for marketing.  These magazines are must reads for any marketing person thinking of joining a Business Swat team.