Why process-only or tech-only fixes never solve your toughest problems

Marketing teams often fall into the trap of fixing complex problems by focusing on either process or technology. 

The result? Pain points get patched, but the underlying issues remain. Here’s why isolated transformations fail — and what leaders can do to build lasting solutions.

Where most transformations go wrong

Ever been in a room where the walls are plastered with sticky notes? There was probably a pre-read, a facilitator or two with a timer and a parking lot — that catch-all board where tricky questions get set aside for later — maybe even someone blowing a whistle to keep things on track.

The execs kick things off: Why are we here? What will this achieve?

Then the consultants descend. Let the process mapping begin.

Swim lanes. Handoff points. Decision makers. Stakeholders. RACI charts. Today is all about people and process. The message is clear: fix the people side first — because until you do, no technology will save you.

No more silos. No more pain points. Content, data and insights delivered on time and on spec. Campaigns running smoothly, reaching the right audiences with the right consent and the right message. Manual workloads eliminated. Reporting and KPIs finally aligned across every team and layer.

Fast-forward three years: you still have that 102-slide deck trying to digitize the outputs from that day. Maybe you even remember that room wallpapered with RACI maps for months. Twenty-eight steps to launch a campaign across three channels? Not a step too few! And exactly who in global legal needs to be informed?

Funny as those memories may be, here’s the hard truth: somewhere, in a parallel universe, someone mapped out the perfect martech stack. It has real-time streaming, abstraction layers, ETL pipelines and CI/CD. Almost as an afterthought, they put a note in one corner reading, “People and process.”

Dig deeper: It’s time for a better approach to change management in marketing

Why fixing one side never works

I believe in having a robust process—clarity about who does what and when is essential, especially in complex organizations with multiple stakeholders.

However, in any scenario involving software and data, it is shortsighted to examine processes without considering the systems that shape them.

It’s just as naïve to think that bringing in a shiny new CDP, CRM, CMS, DAM, ESP or DXP will magically solve your problems. These systems only deliver value if they’re used — and how they’re used will determine the size of that value.

In other words, no serious marketing, digital, data, martech or insights challenge is solved by focusing solely on process or technology. Technology inevitably drives change and the need for new methods. Likewise, better processes can unlock the full potential of your tools, sometimes even eliminating the need for a dreaded RFP.

And yet, nearly every organization goes down either the tech or process rabbit hole — pouring in endless time and resources — only to emerge with half a solution.

That’s because they tackle these challenges in isolation. They have lost sight of how interdependent technology, process, and strategy are. When this tunnel vision sets in, even well-intentioned efforts fall short. Marketing leaders need a broader lens — one that helps them recognize when they’re focusing too tightly and equips them to lead integrated transformations that stick.

When pain points mislead

Pain points are helpful as a discovery tool. (People love to rant!) However, focusing only on pain leaves too much room for the doctor to prescribe the most obvious fix.

Take these common symptoms, often used to justify a martech change:

• Data fragmentation and martech tools operating in silos.
• Inability to scale or adapt to external changes.
• Heavy reliance on manual campaign setup.
• Difficulty coordinating campaigns across multiple channels.
• No centralized view of customer engagement across touchpoints.
• Slow analytics and disconnected reporting.
• Poor platform adoption.
• Increased compliance risks.

Compare them to the signs that a process change is needed:

• Data is scattered across multiple platforms with no single source of truth.
• Inconsistent campaign performance data across systems and reports
• Poor visibility into KPI performance.
• Weak integration between marketing tools limits cross-channel efforts.
• Heavy reliance on manual processes.
• Difficulty scaling marketing activities.
• Teams operating in silos.

See the overlap? Whether the conversation is about process or technology, the culprits are usually the same:

• Data and reporting silos.
• Slow marketing activation.
• Excessive manual workloads.
• Poor adaptability and scalability.
• Weak cross-functional collaboration.
• Inconsistent customer experiences.

Every organization faces some mix of these challenges. Walk into a discovery session anywhere in the world and you’ll hear the same themes: silos, collaboration, customer experience, scalability and speed.

What happens next often depends entirely on who’s leading the discovery. A process consultant? You’ll get a process fix. A technology specialist? You’ll get a tech solution.

If the people who reported those pain points aren’t involved in shaping the solution, you’ll likely end up with a bandage on a Frankenstein.

Dig deeper: Martech maestros focus on internal processes — and drive external success

The bias of specialists

There’s logic to keeping solutions separate from diagnosis: people don’t always know all available options. They can only solve for the context they know, not the context that’s coming. If you’d asked for a solution to transportation problems before the invention of the motor vehicle, you’d get a faster horse.

The trouble is, if you spend a disproportionate amount of time documenting pain points with people in the know but don’t dedicate at least as much time asking how they’d solve them — or what they’ve already tried — you’ll likely end up with an outsider’s solution that’s overly simplified.

Bring in a specialized team to design that solution, and the rabbit hole gets deeper. A technology consultant will say you need new tools or your existing ones need better integration. A process consultant will likely highlight unclear roles and responsibilities across teams.

Both will probably flag inefficient use of tools. Both will have different ideas about why that’s the case. And both will want to draw diagrams — diagrams that don’t talk to each other. 

Ultimately, it will be your responsibility to reconcile those perspectives, so make sure you’ve heard from both sides before making the call.

Process vs. tech: The split

To illustrate this, let’s revisit some of those symptoms we discussed earlier and see how they might be interpreted:

• Speed of marketing activations and bottlenecks:
  • IT consultant: Lack of automation.
  • Process consultant: Unclear handoffs and priorities.
• Adaptability and agility challenges:
  • IT consultant: Outdated tools that no longer support evolving marketing requirements.
  • Process consultant: Inflexible processes that are too slow to respond to changing customer needs.
• Fragmented customer experience:
  • IT consultant: No platform to support omnichannel coordination or journey orchestration.
  • Process consultant: Uncoordinated activations creating inconsistent messaging across channels.

If you listen only to the IT consultant, you’ll redeploy your martech stack and then hand it over to the same under-resourced team of four people spread across five markets, with seven reporting lines and three cost centers.

Listen only to the process consultant, and you’ll likely end up with perfect clarity on the exact 37 steps required to:

• Extract the report from an email attachment.
• Paste it into the shared doc.
• Change the column header.
• Drag down the formula.
• Click to run macros. 

The reports will be 100% accurate and delivered on time — just as long as three people spend an hour every Monday at 7 a.m. to make it happen.

You’ll solve the pain points, but the real problems will remain. Those problems are the ones you need to tackle.

Every business is made up of complex individuals who are expected to maximize their effectiveness through a maze of platforms and automations while delivering at scale and speed and working seamlessly across teams and systems.

Breaking the cycle

How can you address these pain points effectively and drive meaningful, lasting change?

If you’re in a position tasked with this, chances are you’ve either become a specialist yourself — inevitably prone to bias — or you’re too far removed to see the actual root causes. In either case, some form of discovery will be necessary, whether led internally or externally.

There’s one essential rule: get the right advice. That means well-informed advisors who understand your business and advocate for process change just as much as technology.

• Listen to those reporting the pain points: Especially if past attempts to change things have failed.
• Bring in trusted advisors on both sides: Make sure they’re equally qualified, understand each other’s motivations and are incentivized to deliver a solution, not just their preferred fix.
• Request proposals from both angles: Scrutinize, compare, contrast and identify gaps, because there will always be some.
• Combine perspectives into one comprehensive plan: Pinpoint issues precisely, propose a process fix, a technology fix, or both, and tell people why you chose it.

If you have the time, try swapping the solutions — process for tech, tech for process — and see if anything unexpected emerges.

Yes, this approach will take time. But you may thank yourself for it down the line.

Dig deeper: Marketing and IT are rewriting the rules of digital transformation

The post Why process-only or tech-only fixes never solve your toughest problems appeared first on MarTech.