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Marketing - Too Important to be Left Solely to the Marketing Department

  • Artigo

Marketing might seem like an odd thing to include on TechNet but it’s actually a vital resource for a successful IT department..

Twenty years ago in a building far far away I led a small project team inside HM Customs & Excise (way before it merged into HMRC). Our application was designed to get investigators to share information previously held in locked cabinet and notebooks to improve intelligence gathering and ensure operations didn’t inadvertently overlap. The application development side was going fine the challenge we faced was getting our user base at the various entry points into the UK to use and that meant marketing. We did this by getting our best users to be ambassadors to evangelise to others and they also wrote the manual and online help in Customs speak.

Later on I worked on a number of business intelligence projects in the private sector and the challenge we faced here was that our new solution was actually more accurate than what it replaced. This meant that results seemed to fly in the face of what was expected and we had to build trust in the system as well as carefully train users as in a more powerful and flexible solution it can be easier to make a mistake and come up with the wrong result. The solution was again marketing coupled with education and training.

At Microsoft I am on the receiving end of marketing from the internal IT guys (MSIT). It might be they just want me to upgrade or patch my machine but increasingly they are promoting a self select model where I can not only choose my device but also which version of Office and Windows I need and I can sign up for Elite programs to be the an early adopter which helps them test deployments and get feedback as well as having a core of users to promote the next big thing. MSIT make use of Yammer to directly illicit the coffee point gossip and get feedback on things like fitting out meeting rooms with the latest unified comms gear and issues with certain devices. 

This might still seem like unnecessary fluff to some but in a world of cloud and outsourcing we not only need to do a great job but we need to show that we are relevant to the success of the business. That’s why this sort of stuff is part of ITIL as Ed mentions in his article. Sadly there isn’t a Microsoft Virtual Academy course on this so why not pop round to the marketing/PR department and see how they do things and apply their expertise internally.

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Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 24, 2014
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2014
    I tend to work on big IT infrastructure projects which by their nature means I interview many people both internal to the organisation and externally. Furthermore I often find myself as unofficial career guidance for ex-colleagues and friends where I
  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2014
    I know it can be a terrible thing to consider, but sometimes IT professionals and Marketing professionals need to work together, scary stuff indeed. All joking aside, miscommunication or the inability to collaborate in the workplace is damaging to business
  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2014
    When I once told my doctor I worked in IT, he told me everyone now works in IT - 15 years later I’m telling organisations that IT now needs to work with everyone.
  • Anonymous
    October 07, 2014
    Over the last few months myself and my company have started to look at and use the power of social media to make sure we get our message out to our customers, So I thought some of my fellow IT professionals may find it interesting to see how we’ve