How Will They Know You Are Excellent?

Traditionally IT has not been viewed in terms of the value it provides, Zoppi says. "They're keeping the lights on, and nobody calls the phone companies and says 'thanks for bringing me dial tone'. Also there are a lot of technology people who are not really trained or very astute about how they market themselves because they are focused on service delivery. And the third piece of this is the view of IT as sort of a necessary evil, which turns into [the CIO] becoming an apologist for technology, which they didn't write, but just support.

"All of these things culminate in the wrong positioning, the wrong view of IT, or at least a misguided view of what IT can be. And it feeds everything - it actually causes people to not properly engage IT in how to do things better," Zoppi says.

Armstrong says that often when consultants prove unable to help companies realize the value they might otherwise achieve, not just from an applications perspective but from an infrastructure perspective, a failure to market is to blame.

Defining IT marketing as the art of appropriately setting expectations between customer and service provider such that both entities enjoy a mutually beneficial economic relationship, the authors believe there is a considerable amount of synergy to be derived from key business relationships, and that all types of symptoms of IT being out of sync with the business needs can be mitigated by a sound marketing and communication strategy.

"We can dispel the misinterpretations of the maxim, 'The customer is always right', if we suspend our belief that marketing is a luxury. In fact, where a sound marketing plan is laid out, the customer can always be supported properly, and therefore be 'right'. This plan becomes a cornerstone in supporting an appropriately scaled information technology and business response plan," they say.

"Neither the customer nor IT department members are presumed to be psychic," the authors argue. "Many goods and services, no matter how beneficial or innovative, have remained in obscurity due to a lack of presence in the consumer consciousness. Many inferior products (VHS video format) eclipse their superior competitor (BETA) due to excellent marketing campaigns. No matter how technologically sophisticated and superior the services provided, the disastrous results of considering marketing is a luxury cannot be overstated.

"There are a multitude of options the CIO can take. Doing nothing is a certain path to failure, so it's important to understand the effects of not marketing IT."

In a profession where most practitioners have risen through the ranks of IT rather than through the business, the tendency is strongly towards being a reactive, rather than business-driven, organization. Taking efforts to market IT can counterbalance these tendencies by providing overt and proactive means towards establishing appropriate levels of service delivery and expectation within all layers of the organization. When CIOs cannot articulate service value, customers tend to see their organizations as high-cost, low-quality service providers. When IT groups demonstrate cost competitiveness and service differentiation, it allows them to build IT value chain models to diagnose their deficiencies, improve their images, identify new cost reduction opportunities, link to vendors' value chains and build key differentiators.

Further, says Zoppi, when CIOs look to senior VPs and C-level folk for strategic input, IT is free to transform itself from an order taker to a unit capable of detecting gaps in strategic thinking and execution far more quickly than people guess.

However, every CIO is different, points out Armstrong. Some have come up through the ranks of operations, others through the ranks of applications, and still others have worked in the business before taking up their present position. Each different background helps the CIO to bring something different to the role. "Some of us are natural marketeers, and you happen to be talking to two of them - it's just our nature to market ourselves, to market our departments, to market the abilities of the people within our organization," she says. "That doesn't mean we're more successful than other CIOs, it's just that maybe we have had different kinds of successes."