Chapter 5. Marketing and Communications

Understanding the company's mission, its linkage with the IT functions, and how the task of determining and defining the services will be initiated, is essential to delivering a set of integrated enterprise services. Gaining early support from all the key stakeholders is another requirement for success. The most basic and essential prerequisite to marketing and communicating the IT story is having a history of delivering quality, cost-effective , valuable services on a timely basis. Given that these vital initiatives are accomplished, marketing and communicating of the product, and delivery of integrated enterprise services, is critical to ensure that maximum organizational benefit and return on IT investment is achieved.

A Gartner Research note, "Marketing the IS Organization: Questions and Answers," published 26 September 1996, defines marketing from an IT perspective:

Marketing is essentially the process of understanding, anticipating , shaping, and satisfying the customer's perception of value. For the IT organization, marketing entails knowing the primary internal markets; enterprise executives, operation and line managers, work-area managers, and production end users investigating and predicting their requirements, developing feedback mechanisms for performance, and articulating services relevant to the internal group 's ideas of value. For example, marketing to enterprise executives should focus on governance issues (e.g., decision making, funding, metrics, and architecture), whereas marketing to business managers should focus on the changes and possibilities caused by IT's impact on business and the business's impact on IT. (Reprinted with permission ”August 1999.) ^[1]

^[1] D. Turick, "Marketing the IS Organization: Questions and Answers," GartnerGroup Research Note, September 26, 1996.

Success of an IT organization depends on its operational capabilities, but it must leverage those capabilities with a persuasive, politically savvy, marketing and communication approach that is ingrained in the culture of the organization.