SIDEBAR: Lasting Impressions

CIOs should turn to marketing concepts such as the use of price, product, promotion, placement and people, and also impression management, as levers to increase customer satisfaction, according to Joan Mann, associate professor of information technology at Old Dominion University and vice president of Adept Solutions Global.

Mann told CIO magazine in an interview that it is vital for those in IT functions to be aware of how impressions are made and to actively work to do "the right thing" by their users. Mann subsequently forwarded a case study about the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which appeared in CIO Government magazine in April 2003 ("A Great Big Helping Hand"). Mann said the case study made it very clear that the ABS was about marketing to both IT and its users.

"Their innovative solution was brilliant and definitely could be considered marketing and impression management as well," she said. "This is just the sort of work other CIOs should emulate."

A long-time innovator, the ABS runs annual week-long technology road shows to help counter a tendency in even the most IT-literate organizations towards what CIO Jonathan Palmer calls "learned helplessness" - a condition that inhibits sufferers from positively participating in change and generates a state of apathy, and which is frequently generated by complex IT systems.

The ABS corporate plan tries to counter any tendency to learned helplessness by encouraging staff to view skills development as a duty they have to the organization under the ABS model of mutual obligation.

But since 2001 the organization has also been running an annual ABSTech, a week-long IT awareness program aimed at providing resources to help IT staff gain necessary IT skills and at launching major IT environment upgrades. ABSTech 2002, with the theme "Help Yourself to IT", extended the conference to all ABS employees. Its objectives were:

• an improved level of awareness by all ABS staff of the set of IT skills required to work effectively in the ABS
• ABS staff able to do their job effectively through having the right skills and information delivered at the right time in the right way
• the ABS getting the most out of existing and new technology investments
• the ABS programs and staff getting the most out of the evolution of the IT environment
• greater self-reliance among ABS staff in acquiring IT skills and in solving IT problems.

No one quite remembers who first conceived the notion of ABSTech, but Palmer says the impetus was a group discussion about the difficulties the ABS faced in rolling out changes to its environment, and the fact that each environmental change required its own communication and education strategy. Individual project teams were frequently either under-resourced or ineffective in following through on that part of a project; the last thing they were typically thinking about when getting the project under way was the education and rollout that follows.

Palmer said at the time that ABSTech had proved so worthwhile it is not only set to become an annual event, but will even affect the timing of some future rollouts.

Mann says such an approach could be the ideal way to counter the IT user revolt.