7 Practical Tips For Marketing IT To Business Stakeholders

[stephenmann]

Most internal IT organizations are focused on protecting and growing the business. The people who work in IT — and IT service management (ITSM) professionals in particular — are often passionate, intelligent, skilled, rational, and driven by the desire to do a great job. So why do business colleagues often see the IT organization as unhelpful, out of touch and, most damning of all in the business lexicon, as an overhead?* :

Rather than creating a long list of why we are where we are, let's flip this to "What can the CIO and IT organization do to better demonstrate the business-value realized from the company's annual investment in IT?" One solution is that CIOs and the IT organization need to market themselves and their services better — they need to be proficient at marketing.

"What the … Marketing?" I hear you cry.

This doesn't mean that we need to slick back our hair and invest in cufflinks or Prada accessories; instead marketing offers CIOs and the IT organization the ability to: "communicate the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling the product or service" (Wikipedia).

Which includes: "capturing marketing insights, connecting with customers, building strong brands, shaping the market offerings, delivering and communicating value, creating long-term growth, and developing marketing strategies and plans" (Wikipedia). Where the relationships with customers and consumers of IT services is a key element.

As an aside, a recent Gartner blog "Messaging in Technology Marketing Stinks, But Improvement Is Possible" offers great advice on how storytelling and focusing on the outcome (and not the technology) can help to better position and market IT.

Seven "marketing IT" tips from and for CIOs

Recently, three CIO-level customers participated in a ServiceNow on-demand webinar, "CIOs: Market Like Your Career Depends On It" to discuss the power and benefits of successfully marketing IT. This blog distills their collected wisdom into seven "Marketing IT" tips:

1. CIOs and IT employees must have an elevator pitch — what's yours? Consider this: If you or your team are stopped in the corridor by other C-level executives and asked "What do you do?" would talk of data, applications, VMs, tin, cables, and the cloud be the right answer? Probably not. Here is a CIO's example from the webinar: "We are responsible for creating business solutions that accelerate the growth and shareholder value of the company. We are here to protect the business, to stabilize the business, and to enable the business. I'm a business executive with accountability for IT functional systems and solutions."
2. It's about marketing IT as a business enabler not as a technology provider. It's not about what IT does it's about what IT achieves through what it does. Business colleagues don't care what goes on behind the velvet curtain that separates them from the IT organization — they are focused on business outcomes. They also want to talk in business, not IT, language.
3. It's about communication, relationships, and establishing trust. IT can struggle with the idea of marketing and sales but it needs to communicate (to business peers) what it can do to make a difference. The IT organizations needs to deliver solutions to real problems and show as much passion for improving the business as line-of-business teams — "confidence breeds confidence breeds trust."
4. Realize that people development is key in making IT a strategic business function. IT employees need to have similar goals and objectives to their business colleagues; and compensation that is in line too — that is in line with business growth, efficiency, revenue targets, or similar. Also remember that marketing is a people-to-people activity.
5. Look at the IT experience for customers or employees. Focus on the translation of IT services and processes into experiences. And remember that the IT-focused "ilities" — availability, scalability, etc. — are only relevant to an IT audience.
6. Build a 90 day plan and establish suitable metrics. In terms of which metrics are important — ask executive teams, their direct reports, and operational managers what's important to, and what's hurting, them. Start by remediating the operational performance issues that are hurting — especially outages and service degradation. Then start planning for enhancing those processes. Build up confidence and trust and demonstrate alternative ways of doing what is done today.
7. Market and sell your wins. In the context of IT, marketing is about building relationships with business colleagues, increasing trust, and allowing IT the opportunity to demonstrate what it can do on behalf of the business. Webinar examples included: a dedicated PC in the executives' office which shows their dashboard of the processes that IT delivers for them; monthly workshops that show business units what issues have been solved (through IT) outside of their areas that could also be applied elsewhere in the organization; regular informal communications — picking up the phone to ensure that business leaders know what is happening with IT as well as pulling out other opportunities for IT to help; and monthly meetings that talk about new developments in technology and its applicability rather than just talking performance and projects.

There is so much that CIOs and their IT teams can do to transform the status quo into an IT organization that has people, products, and services that are in-demand rather than being something that is forced upon business colleagues. Marketing, in the experience of three ServiceNow customers, can make a big difference.
I'll leave you with the webinar link: "CIOs: Market Like Your Career Depends On It"

* Thanks to James Finister for some of this fine introduction.