[EDUCASE] Is Your IT Organization a Marketing One?

http://www.educause.edu/mobile/emobile_ajax.php?op=fulltext&nid=272945

The article describes the topic of IT work marketing. Depicted situation says from the perspective of university campus IT but the outcome can be applied to all domains including commercial companies.
IT work usually comes with quite a lot of necessary investments. For this reason IT departments are treated rather as a cost center and not as a partner that brings some financial contribution.
Being perceived as a cost center results in serving as a target to shrink and squeeze.
That is false economy.
IT  can bring a real value to the process improvement but for this to happen there must be a willing force on both sides – the IT side and the rest of the business side. Mentioning about opposite sides suggests that there is some kind of a barrier or border. And there is one.
IT people prefer to concentrate on their work. It’s more constructive we think (I include myself into IT crowd :) ) to do the work rather to talk about it.
On the opposite the non technical people that on a daily basis use IT systems rarely communicate with IT about what annoys them in using the systems.
They share within themselves their opinion on IT service quality but they do not say the same in plain text to IT itself. They talk to IT directly when there is an outage of system. At that time there is usually a negative communication influenced by the stress.
This should be changed.
IT could listen more to what users say about their needs and users could share more directly with IT the real needs they have.
IT marketing can be a helping tool to perform this communication.