Publish, Publish, Publish

Professional marketers swear by the effectiveness of print vehicles and advise that one or more should be a staple in any IT campaign. But before publishing any collateral, read it carefully from the audience's point of view. "I don't think it's possible to overcommunicate," says Smurfit-Stone CIO Jim Burdiss. "But I do think it's possible to overmarket. Then people see it as self-serving. Instead of helping demonstrate value, it becomes idle chatter and does the opposite of what it's intended to do."

The IT annual report is one of the most effective tools used by the survey's respondents. Smurfit-Stone's IT shop publishes an annual report that gives people an appreciation of the scope of IT's responsibilities and its performance levels (for example, 110,000 calls were handled in the support centre at a cost of $US17.80 per call). And it itemizes the value created by IT projects - say hypothetically, a forecasting tool reduced inventory by 10 percent and saved the company $1 million. The report is personalized with snapshot profiles of IT staff and includes an index of whom to contact for what. It also features a popular glossary of industry and technology terms, defining such concepts as problem escalation, enterprise application integration and IT asset management.

"It's designed to not just be an annual report but also a resource tool for customers," says Burdiss. "If we just reported financial numbers, everyone would go: 'Aw, they're just patting themselves on the back.'"

Out of 37,000 total Smurfit-Stone employees, nearly 19,200 chose to download a PDF version of last year's report from the Web. Tom Lange, the company's director of public relations, finds the glossary and IT contact list personally helpful and says the annual report has done a lot to change the general perception of IT. "I used to think of IT as this black hole of people and IT stuff," he confesses. "People would say things like: 'Why can't IT just get that done? Why does it take two days to do anything?' "Now, instead of wondering what's going on, Lange and other business customers know what IT is up to, what the priorities are and how IT efforts relate to the company's packaging business.

State of Washington CIO Stuart McKee says his organization's annual reports feature content similar to a private-sector shareholder report, but he consciously skimps on their production values to avoid the perception that he's wasting taxpayer dollars. Like Smurfit-Stone's report, McKee's are available in PDF format on the Web site or in a three-ring binder.

Simpler than annual reports, brochures and newsletters are good vehicles for familiarizing executives with systems under development or technologies being explored. GSI Commerce creates brochures to raise internal awareness of the benefits of its proprietary technologies. Brochures give overviews of the system and associated processes and outline its benefits and features. A brochure promoting new real-time upselling technology prompted business executives to schedule implementation of the technology with key clients sooner than originally planned - leading to a 3 percent bump in revenue. (For samples of Smurfit-Stone's IT newsletter and GSI Commerce's technology brochure, go to www.cio.com/ritlab.)

Keep Score

Publicizing service-level metrics and audit data is another common form of IT marketing, and scorecards are often the vehicle of choice. Global Crossing keeps a formal scorecard on the company's Web portal. Updated monthly, the scorecard tracks availability of nearly 100 core applications and gives stats on network uptime, customer service and help desk metrics, and the number of development projects delivered and their respective ROI. IT revaluates annually what should be tracked.

The danger with scorecards, though, is that IT organizations can devote a lot of resources to reporting metrics that are meaningless to their business counterparts. An operations infrastructure scorecard might show availability at 99.999 percent. But what does that missing .001 percent really mean to a businessperson? asks Meta Group's Rubin. What would be more useful to business leaders, he contends, are scores showing "the technology cost of goods". For example, in a health-care setting, the IT costs for one patient day spent in the hospital would be germane.

Play to Win

Finally, we come to the most common and effective marketing tactic, according to the CIO survey - winning and publicizing IT awards. Awards confer on IT a third-party seal of approval. To avoid dimming the lustre of this glow, Smurfit-Stone's Burdiss is careful not to overhype IT awards, positioning them as awards won by the entire company, not just IT.

McKee has his IS communications director, Nancy Jackson, monitor award opportunities for Washington, maintaining a calendar of application dates. Jackson looks for opportunities to showcase the state agencies' innovative uses of IT. If IS wins; it shares the spotlight with agency customers, generating goodwill and low-key PR for IS, McKee says.

Low-key or not, getting the word out about IT's value is essential. CIOs who are squeamish about marketing need to get over it - fast. "I don't think you have a choice," says Bedbury. "If you don't market yourself, someone else will." And you might not like the image you end up with.

5 CAMPAIGN TACTICS

Respondents to the CIO survey "How to Run IT Like a Business," ranked the following as the most effective marketing practices.

• Win and showcase IT awards
• Brand specific IT/business projects
• Publicize service-level metrics and audits
• Publish a catalogue of services/ standards
• Distribute an IT annual report