Crossview has been putting on an executive summit on cross-channel for a couple of years now, and I’ve found the topics covered there to be both very timely and very insightful. Last year, I wrote about the ROI of customer passion as a result of discussions at the Crossview event. And this year, capturing another major shift in the world of cross-channel, we had a long discussion about marketing.

This topic is near and dear to RSR’s heart — later this year we will be launching a survey that looks specifically into the rise of the Chief Marketing Officer. Why? Because as more retailers are putting the customer at the center of the business, it seems that the natural owner of that relationship should be Marketing. Who has customer data in your organization today? Who has the best chance at a single view of the customer? Marketing.

At Crossview’s event, the discussion started much the same way as I suspect it starts at most retailers. Sucharita Mulpuru of Forrester presented a great overview of Social-Local-Mobile, and no discussion of social is complete without an in-depth on Facebook. This topic was of extreme interest to the retail audience — with lots of questions about the advisability of selling on Facebook, and whether it is worth dropping your entire eCommerce site onto a Facebook iframe.

The general consensus was, No. Both the traffic and the conversion rate on Facebook is extremely low, and from Forrester’s consumer studies, shoppers don’t appear to go to retailers’ Facebook pages with the expectation of being able to buy. However, the audience also conveyed something like resignation — there are enough retailers out there doing it that they feel like it may become inevitable. But then questions followed — what are the successful use-cases of Facebook, if selling isn’t it? How do you handle customers who come to Facebook to complain about customer service or a problem with a product? And a certain amount of frustration, particularly from the CIO’s in the room, that here is what is becoming yet another channel that marketing ran out to create, and now IT has to support.

The bad news is this problem isn’t going to go away. If a retailer has embraced the customer as central to their business, then they have to move at the speed of the customer. If the customer is on Facebook, retailers have to figure out how to be there, whether it is through selling or something else. If the customer wants to be able to tag a product that she bought in a specific store location and through her mobile phone add it to her Facebook page, then the retailer needs to help enable that.

In RSR’s surveys, retailers consistently rate our technology infrastructure prevents us as one of their top three organizational challenges. It doesn’t matter what the topic is — pricing, eCommerce, store, supply chain. IT is a barrier. But it’s not entirely IT’s fault. When you treat an area of your business as a support function only, then you invest in it like a support function. Expediency is more important than long-term planning, and when the business as a whole doesn’t really grasp everything that IT does or needs, then it gets under-funded and abused.

Over the course of a decade, IT in retail has moved from a support function to a primary enabler of commerce. Take away technology, and there’s no web site. There’s no mobile site. If you come from the view that IT just makes it possible to capture transactions faster, then you are completely missing the point of the eCommerce decade.

The natural inclination of the business (with the exception of marketing, of course), is to try to reign in marketing. Quit trying to add new capabilities to our mobile site, Facebook page, eCommerce site. Quit asking for ridiculously hard things like mobile coupons and gift cards. Slow down. Work with the rest of the business and start being more of a team player.

That’s the wrong approach. Marketing is moving at the speed of the customer. The rest of the business — IT included — needs to get faster. The speed of the customer is the speed of retail today. The good news is that technology solution providers are getting it. They’re offering surround strategies, like mobile POS that sidelines the need for a retailer’s ancient, untouchable store POS over time. They’re offering paths to modernization, like a roadmap for eCommerce and POS integration — a road to one view and interaction for the customer, no matter the channel she chooses. And they are increasingly offering things like managed services to take over the old, version-locked, off-maintenance, decrepit bits of IT that a retailer spends too much time supporting, so that said retailer can get on with acceleration.

We’ve said before that cross-channel is transformative — the fundamental business model of retail has to change. Well, that applies to IT too — and, like it or not, the business is going to have to fund that if it ever wants to catch up to the speed of customers. Marketing is not the problem. It is the answer.