Learning Marketing's Secrets

IT is frequently viewed as a cost centre, Zoppi points out, yet there are certain levels of value that IT brings through the mere fact of its existence. One is liberating the functional parts of the organization from having to worry about the minutiae and the enormous detail that is required these days in service delivery of any kind, and which is often lost in translation. The trouble is that unless you bring that fact to people's attention, they tend to remain unaware of it. Like people who, having installed Windows on their home PC, assume they are fully equipped to get a Windows installation to scale to many thousands of computers. Most people underestimate the value IT brings because they simply have no way of recognizing it.

Zoppi says CIOs wanting to master marketing techniques and practices have a wealth of excellent books to choose from. Doing a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis can also be a good way to start. The SWOT analysis provides information that is helpful in matching the firm's resources and capabilities to the competitive environment in which it operates. Strengths and weaknesses are environmental factors internal to the firm while opportunities or threats are external to the firm. But CIOs really wanting to market IT successfully should also be looking to forge close alliances with the organization's marketing department.

"A SWOT analysis is a good starting point to at least form critical thinking around what you have to do and how to go about, but it is the alliances that led us to write this book in the first place, and that are one of the best ways to do it. No CIO can do any of the work these days in solitude," Zoppi says. "A community [of peers] is the first best place for CIOs to get perspective from others on how they think they're being viewed, and how to counteract it.

"There are a lot of good tricks that I've learned from some wonderful marketing people in my career, so [the marketing department] is not a bad place to start," Zoppi says. "But there are a lot of parts of the company that are feeling a different kind of pain, and I think that forging alliances through a solutions-generating approach, versus talking tasks, turns out to be probably the most profitable, because now you're working at solving a problem together. IT has to initiate the conversation, because it may not be apparent to the part of the company that's feeling the pain that IT could be a partner, so there is a lot of ombudsman that a CIO is going to have to carry with him or her," Zoppi says.

"I think [one] thing that's really important that has been extraordinarily helpful to me is I do utilize my marketing department in the company," Armstrong says. "We have a person in the company who's responsible in marketing for marketing communications and internal communications. I use that person weekly to help me craft messages that the business will understand regarding my major projects. If I've got roadblocks that I'm running up against, I get that person to help write the communication, to get me in contact with the right people. I use our external Web site and our internal Web site. I will use any tool that I can that our marketing department has, and you know what, they love it - they just love it when people come to them and want to make use of their services."

It is important that people know they have colleagues in their own company that are willing and ready to help them, Armstrong says.