Is marketing a frivolous activity for IT organizations? Does IT need to market itself?
Evelyn Hubbert of Forrester thinks so. She released a paper on this subject a few months back. Yes, the IT budget is under pressure and yes, there is already more work to do than the team is able to handle, so carving out resources to do IT marketing is a non-starter! Or is it?
I would argue that all the hardware, software and process investment will yield little if IT does not focus on customer need and customer relationship management. The perception at the end of the day would still be that IT does not get business and IT costs too much. IT really needs to start thinking about the services that it provides through the 4P's of marketing - Product, Position, Price, and Placement to communicate with its business users.
If you already have a Service Catalog, that might be the place to start. After all, it is the face of IT! Why is that important? I have spoken to customers who have Service Catalogs that showed their services in a professional manner but still suffer from adoption and customer satisfaction issues. It turned out that the services were described from IT's point-of-view. There was a good amount of information but it didn't speak to their end users. They would have benefited from applying marketing principles to their Service Catalog management!
If you are interested, especially if you already have a newScale solution in place, the newScale Service Catalog Marketing Library is targeted at helping customers embark on this journey. It includes templates, best practices and technologies that you can use to make your newScale Service Catalog come alive for your customers. It still wouldn't slice bread and cook breakfast - but you'd be amazed how a different mindset can do for IT.
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