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A growing number of CEOs have come to realize that innovative, cost-effective information management can be a source of competitive advantage. Similarly, a small but growing cadre of CIOs now recognize that innovative, cost-effective information management about IT (i.e., marketing) is a critical ingredient of career success.
In the past, IT executives would react with disdain at the thought of actually marketing IT to the rest of the organization. For these technologists, it likely conjured mental images of the most crass forms of culture gone wrong, from bad jingles to intrusive telemarketers. Engaging in marketing was viewed as somehow cheapening the craft. And for many other CIOs, marketing IT simply wasn't on the radar screen of critical tasks.
Welcome to the new world of marketing IT. High-performance CIOs have rightly concluded that success depends on meeting the needs of internal and external customers and then ensuring people know those needs have been met. You can't win the game if you don't keep score. What good is sitting at the strategy table if the contributions of IT are invisible? Today's technologists know that positive business results and career success are linked to better understanding their customers and to getting out there and aggressively selling the IT function.
For this month's installment of CIO Habitat, researchers contacted 161 companies (71 large enterprises; 90 midmarket firms) to learn how IT markets itself, listens to customers and responds to service-level problems.
Despite the fact that respondents now grasp the importance of marketing IT (see Figure 1), the results also indicate that IT executives need to broaden their perception of marketing. They need to understand that it's not just about outbound messaging through newsletters but about listening to customers and satisfying -- better yet, exceeding -- customer expectations. It's also about reconnecting with dissatisfied customers and apologizing for mistakes.
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