You and Your CIO Career

We like to help the CIO stay on their toes with proactively communicating progress and changes. CIO's who can tap into the social media revolution (eg twitter, YouTube, yammer, LinkedIn, etc.) have a leg up. Tools like these are very effective because the CIO's internal clients already engage these networks and the cost is free or very low.

I believe in actively marketing IT, you just have to do this. I generally use a multi prong approach. Based off of a communication strategy identifying stakeholders and the types of information and delivery mechanism best suited for that particular audience. Included were quarterly newsletters that provided tips to on MS Office products with a section highlighting a recent success. In addition there were business relationship manager who were equipped with talking points as they had ad hoc and regular schedule meetings with their internal clients. There were of course a web site that made all of the communications available for those looking for a past articles or just preferred to pull the information on there own schedules. Also for the business leaders there were quarterly reports showing progress against projects. Lastly an annual in person client satisfaction survey were the results (positive and negative) were published. One more thing, when there were outages we were very diligent about getting the word out quickly and keeping those affected up to date. Keeping users in the dark with silence, their imaginations conjured up situations far worse that reality.

Hi Martha 
You have to actively market your IT successes. I believe it not only helps bring visibility to the hard/great work of your team but also what has been deemed a priority initiative by the company. 
We utilize a SharePoint portal site as the main landing page for my team’s communications. On the home page we have a blog where we post a write up for every project go-live. The post will typically include the business problem, the solution, the benefits received, and the team members involved. The blog post has now become part of the project close out activities and is gaining popularity.  
To improve visibility we cross link our blogs to a number of other internal SharePoint portal sites and recently started rolling up the posts with some additional content and pushing them out via a quarterly newsletter. 
Our VP of corporate communications is now referencing our team as an internal best practice and I believe it is helping keep my team’s morale up and turnover low. 

I like to take a multi-threaded approach. I personally market IT to the business heads as part of my monthly 1x1's with them. We also report our Balanced Scorecard output at senior mgmt meeting on a quarterly basis. And then broader communications via a quarterly IT newsletter to the entire company, IT website updates, monthly PMO reports, etc.

Very early in my career I met Tom Peters (In Search of Excellence)and a key component of Customer Service has always stuck with me. Recall, "If you have a bad experience you will tell 8-10 people, if you have a positive experience, you'll tell 1-2." I always tell my teams, when we have a success, we've got to market it just to stay even in anectodal perception!

I am a big believer in transparency. We tell everyone what we are working on, the status of what we are working on, our over-arching strategic imperatives (which align with the organization's), our long- and short-range plans, our methods and the reasons for our methods. We also spend a lot of time with our internal customers and stakeholders. This high level of communication is counter to our personal and IT cultures but I have found that by focusing on making IT transparent, good things happen.

Very timely inquiry. One of our 2012 key objectives is strategically marketing IT. Our strategy includes increased transparency; self-service catalogs; excising IT-speak; frequent, positive messages; and looking for opportunities to work with external partners to increase the bottom line.

Thanks for these great comments. "Marketing IT" seems like such a straightforward thing to do, but as you all point out, it takes some serious attention, energy, strategy and execution to build it into the fabric of the organization.  
 

Martha, it's interesting that some of the most successful CIOs I have seen over the years were former IBM salespeople. I spent 11 years myself there in a sales role and it would be insightful, I think, to detail what IBM teaches salespeople that CIOs might learn from. One of those things is the powerful role of education, which I have seldom seen CIOs use effectively.