IT departments should be proactive in highlighting their successes.
Julia Vowler offers tips on how
Managing the business' perceptions of IT is just as important as
managing expectations, says Jeremy Ashworth, a management
consultant with Wake-Up. "Regardless of how technically competent
IT is, to create a positive image it needs other skills, such as
marketing and relationship management."
Putting IT on the business radar screen for the right reasons is
not easy, warns Ashworth. "To reinforce the message you will have
to pound and pound again," he says.
He points to two contrasting modes of communication - "thin" and
"dense". Thin communication refers to one-way broadcasting, as with
newsletters and e-mails. He describes it as "fatally impersonal".
Dense communication is personal - face-to-face and
"high-bandwidth".
Ashworth cites an example of a company whose IT department
undertook a programme of environmental community work which tied in
to the company's wider environmental stance.
It involved other non-IT staff from the organisation but gave IT a
high internal profile simply on account of the project, which had
nothing to do with IT's "real" work for the company. "It showed IT
had a bit of flair - people remembered the project," says
Ashworth.
On a real work front the key figures IT needs to communicate with
are people who are recognised as the critical influencers in the
organisation. "Their perception of IT is incredibly important,"
says Ashworth.
Having communicated out, IT must not forget to complete the process
when it has gathered in the opinions of non-IT staff. "IT directors
must ensure that they have a good feedback loop back in to the
business" he says.
After all, there is no point going to the trouble of, say,
undertaking a user satisfaction survey if users never hear how IT
intends to respond to what it found out.
The "culture of response" can be an important indicator of how IT
feels about business, and vice versa. The way user requests are
handled, for example, can set the tone for the underlying
relationship, for good or bad. Telling an enthusiastic senior
manager that his request for a laptop is number 98 on a list of
actions due is not going to impress him.
IT managers must be aware that the IT department may not agree with
business on what is important and urgent, says Ashworth. Although
there may be good reasons for not prioritising a request, IT
managers should be aware that they will be judged on it all the
same - and possibly by a key influencer in the company.
Sometimes, says Ashworth, IT has to admit that it knows there are
problems in the business-IT relationship which need fixing. Coming
clean may be traumatic, but it can be cleansing as well - clearing
the ground for a fresh start. Showing a bit of flair and a sense of
humour can ease the process.
Ashworth remembers one company that held just such a series of
confessional forums and called them "byte back" sessions.
Case study: Nortel Networks
For Rosemary White,
European IS marketing communications manager at Nortel Networks,
promoting the work done by IT within the company is a full-time
job. She sees the value of internal marketing as:
- Generating awareness throughout the rest of the company of IT's
successes
- Creating a vanguard of technology take-up by early
adopters
Facilitating change.
White's role is to liaise between IT and business, working closely
with her counterparts in specialist areas such as customer
relationship management and infrastructure, across the world.
The perennial problem for IT organisations is that IT professionals
use a lot of jargon that is, to them, both familiar and easily
understandable. This is not so easy, of course, for non-ITers. So,
when, say, the IT department is launching a new system or service,
White will take pains to ensure that information about the new
system produced by the IT department is comprehensible to a lay
audience.
"We take a highly technical message from the technical staff and
focus on the business benefits that it will bring. Lose the
technology - but get the business message across," says White. She
deliberately uses herself as a benchmark for testing the
appropriateness of messages from IT to the business. "I come from a
non-technical background, so if I don't understand [what the IT
department is saying]what hope have end-users?" she says.
White also acknowledges that it is not enough just for IT to make
an effort to communicate its activities in the language of business
and hope that it has achieved those aims. It must check that it
has.
"We run a customer satisfaction survey every six months, surveying
half of the workforce each time and the perennial message we get
back is that too much technical language comes out of IT, as well
as reminders that the timeliness of the communication with business
is critical, as is the focus and targeting," she says.
As well as personal presentations for the big messages, White also
ensures that business users can get continuous information in an
easily accessible and comprehensible form. "There used to be a
paper overload but we have dramatically reduced the posters and the
glossy brochures and flyers that get dropped onto desktops, in most
instances down to zero," she says. "Now we tend to use e-mail or
the company intranet."
The IT department at Nortel is urging business to maximise the
benefit of its existing IT set-up. "We are focusing on the tools
that assist workforce productivity - to encourage smart users and
smart managers to use the things we have got most effectively,"
says White.
But with all the focus on communicating IT potential to business,
it is essential, says White, not to forget that communication needs
to be two-way. Part of her job is to ensure that people in IT
understand the need to make their message comprehensible to the
business, and she has to steer a careful course to avoid the
suggestion that she is "belittling the technology".
Something to say?
Have you raised the profile of your
IT department, its achievements and status within the organisation?
If so we would like to hear from you.