The rise of the concept of "Marketing IT" over the past several years has justifiably been met with optimism. By taking more modern and agile approaches to fast-paced digital marketing opportunities, the idea went, we could liberate marketing teams from the traditional problems of enterprise technology deployments. In some cases this has indeed worked.

However, recent survey research by Real Story Group suggests the majority of enterprises still struggle to get suitable value from their MarTech investments.

In particular, enterprise MarTech customers report a host of traditional IT snafus making their (re-)appearance, including project delays and overruns as well as mis-fitting toolsets.

Specifically, RSG's survey of nearly 100 global MarTech leaders found that:

• Only 39% saw their MarTech projects complete on time
• Only 55% stayed within budget
• Average customer satsifaction registers a bare "C+" coming in at 5.8 on a range of 1 to 10, where 5.5 would be middling.

I could spend far too many keystrokes theorizing why this is so. Surely many of the tools remain immature, analysts and consultants have overhyped the technology, and major vendors have definitely over-sold the capabilities of their so-called marketing clouds. (If you have any doubts, check out some of RSG's hard-hitting vendor evaluation research).

The good news is that these self-assessments suggest the possibility of a new era of pragmatism: we know tech is hard, and MarTech is no exception. You can download your own copy of the survey results here.