What IT Can Learn From Marketing - “How can my team improve its standing within the business?”

IT organizations have been asking this question for 20 years, if not more. Yet with all the advancements in technology, business intelligence and executive leadership skills, why hasn’t this question been put to rest?

The factors hindering IT’s efforts in this area have shifted over time, but over the last several years, the race to answer this question has become all the more urgent as a viable, competitive landscape of IT services has emerged. The reality is that IT organizations today must compete for their businesses’ business. This is due to not only to an increasingly self-sufficient and tech-savvy user base, but also to the widespread availability, affordability and ease of implementing X-aaS solutions such as software, infrastructure and storage as a service. The end result is that the business frequently makes its own technology decisions and procures its own solutions—further marginalizing the IT organization in the process.

So the question has shifted from “How can IT improve its standing within the business” to “How can IT improve its standing within a competitive landscape?”

Unfortunately, IT has historically done a poor job of promoting itself and positioning itself as a strategic partner to the business. But this is exactly what IT must do in order to stay relevant.

In fact, it sounds like a job for marketing. Yes, marketing!

The Value Proposition

In order to change the perception of IT’s role within the organization, it’s necessary to employ some fundamental marketing techniques to develop and communicate the IT department’s “value proposition.” A value proposition is a promise of value to be delivered, and that value is determined by the recipient, not the provider. In the case of IT, we may do a terrific job delivering services to the business, but if our customers do not believe those services solve their problems and make their lives easier, then we provide no value to them.

Do you have a value proposition? Does it describe what you offer and why what you offer is useful? Why should the business use your services and not the myriad of cloud-based services available to them?

To develop your value proposition, you must thoroughly understand your business consumers’ needs, wants and behaviors. This means getting to know your users and how they interact with the technology you support. For example, providing time for service desk analysts to get away from their desks to observe how salespeople use the CRM application can provide key insight about how to better support users. Riding along with field service technicians can give analysts a deeper appreciation of the urgency of incidents related to the field service management application. Conducting this type of ethnographic research can position your IT team to alleviate pain and position your group as an enabling partner.  

Once your team has defined its value proposition, you can work to change perception by taking a page from the “pragmatic marketing” playbook and actively demonstrating—and relentlessly communicating—the value your team provides. Yes, you absolutely have to stabilize and support IT services, but you can’t stop there; the IT service desk can be a strategic channel that lies at the intersection of IT and the business. Empowering the function that interacts with your business users each and every day can go a long way toward shifting the conversation.

Persona Management

One of the bigger misconceptions among IT organizations is that the business user base is a single, homogeneous entity, and that non-IT employees have the same level of technology acumen (or lack thereof!) and practices. The truth is, the business does not have a single user type; to the contrary, it may have 50 or more. Understanding that employees have not only different levels of comfort with technology, but also have different use cases, can help the IT organization understand how better to support and deliver IT services. This is where persona management comes in.

For instance, knowing that Frances in accounting is a technology novice in all areas outside of Microsoft Excel can be useful in helping her troubleshoot and resolve an issue. Furthermore, knowing that all of Frances’ issues (regardless of what the service portfolio says) are mission critical when it comes to closing out the fiscal quarter is an important data point in prioritizing incidents. The same goes for your middle-aged account exec road warrior, your millennial contact center representative, and your baby boomer executive VP. Navigating these different roles can be tricky, but understanding these personas, along with their unique pains, goals and objectives, can pay a major role in helping the IT organization craft and deliver on its value proposition. You can start understanding and developing personas through surveys and focus groups if those resources are available to you.

A/B Testing

Having been the sole provider of IT services to this point, IT has become accustomed to providing online experiences that are more aligned with its own needs that with those of the consumer. Take IT self-service portals, for example, which have historically failed to deliver on the promise of reduced IT labor intensity and improved customer satisfaction. The success of IT self-service depends largely on the user’s desire to self-resolve, regardless of how easy IT makes it. Why else would password reset still be the number one IT service desk contact type, despite the wide availability of password reset solutions?

Where IT organizations have fallen short is in creating self-service “experiences” that are aligned with your business culture and personas. Your users may not expect an Amazon-like experience for IT, but utilization data might tell you they don’t want your stuffy portal either.  A/B testing is a systematic, data-driven process that helps marketers test alternative treatments of a web site (or other marketing mediums) to see how various factors influence response rate. Under this model, each version of the web site introduces a variation in layout, messaging, imagery, button style or any other attribute the marketer wants to test. Two versions of the site are run concurrently (unbeknownst to the user), and analysis is conducted across a sample of users to see which version of the site performs more favorably.

IT can use a similar technique to gain an understanding of how the self-service portal can be changed to drive more usage—and ultimately, improved customer satisfaction. Work with alternative versions of your IT self-service portal and see which one(s) resonate with your user base. Generally speaking, the layout should be clean, easy to navigate and, if possible, capture user context to improve the experience. If promoting usage of your self-service portal is a high priority but you don’t have in-house expertise or resources to drive changes, consider investing in a third-party UX design/usability firm.

Embrace Peer-to-Peer Communities

Traditionally, IT organizations have embraced phone, email and chat as their primary support channels. However, social media—specifically peer-to-peer communities—has not be widely regarded as a viable channel. This thinking needs to change.  

A peer-to-peer community can be a dynamic interaction hub where people—including members of the IT organization—can share ideas, provide support and offer suggestions. One specific benefit to the IT organization is that “super-users” within the business can share their knowledge with a wider number of users. For example, when the person most knowledgeable about Salesforce.com is a seasoned sales representative, his willingness to share tips and tricks likely only benefits his closest colleagues who ask him for this type of assistance. Peer-to-peer support allows this kind of assistance to scale by providing him the means to “write once – answer many.” It also enables IT to manage (not police) the community and ensure the information exchanged is vetted for accuracy, provides value and doesn’t put the IT infrastructure at risk.

P2P communities leverage social software tools like Yammer and Jive to let members connect. If your organization uses these types of tools, it’s very likely the conversation about IT has already started. If not, it’s not too late to get in there!

In summary, IT is sitting on a gold mine of assets and intelligence that the proverbial competitive landscape will never possess, including: 1) proximity to and familiarity with the unique needs of its users, 2) a fundamental understanding of the inner workings of the business from a technology perspective, and 3) the broader business’ strategic goals and objectives. If harnessed strategically, this information can be used to position IT as the solution provider of choice. And while IT may not always be the provider of the business “technology,” it can (and should) act as the broker of those capabilities – maintaining its power to decide whether to buy, build or partner.

The above list is by no means an exhaustive list of marketing practices IT can leverage to increase business/IT engagement. But these methods are both practical and affordable, and will give you a great start for demonstrating IT’s value to the business—and changing overall perception of IT’s role within the organization.

For further reading, see the following resources:

How to Effectively Market Your IT Service Desk

7 Essentials that Raise IT’s Value to the Business

Author bio: Jarod Greene is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Cherwell Software , a leader in IT service management (ITSM) and business enablement solutions. As a former Gartner analyst, Jarod Greene spent ten years covering the ITSM industry, with a focus on processes, organizational structure and enabling technologies.