Comments on: “Branding” Your IT Organization

By: itorganization2017

itorganization2017 — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:33:58 +0000

Well, thank you very much! It’s comments such as yours that keep us blogging! Happy commenting!

By: Watch Shrek

Watch Shrek — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:31:12 +0000

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By: itorganization2017

itorganization2017 — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:01:15 +0000

Brad, thanks very much for this excellent and important reminder of the dangers inherent here.

I’m actually very conflicted over this (my post) whole line of reasoning. On the one hand, one can argue that the ‘IT organization’ as such should be ‘invisible’. When great infrastructure works, it should be like great background music – soothing and satisfying at a subconscious level but never intruding into the foreground. On the other hand, one can argue that the distinction between ‘business’ and ‘IT’ should by now be moot – the two have become seamlessly integrated.

However, I think ‘Intel Inside’ might be the most relevant branding exemplar in this space. To most PC users, the internal processor is invisible – but Intel Inside reinforces an assurance of quality. When we buy a PC branded this way we know that the primary label (HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.) is where ‘the buck stops’ so to speak, but we generally feel good about having a quality (Intel) component at the core. This, I think, is the right balance between the processor’s (Intel) branding and the PC manufacturer’s (HP, et al) branding.

But your caution is well taken – any time we do something visible that is about ‘the IT organization,’ we risk reinforcing the “we/they” dichotomy, which is always risky!

Thanks, as ever, for your most insightful comment!

By: Brad King

Brad King — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 14:25:40 +0000

When “branding” an internal IT organization I would recommend an extra measure of attention to how the marketing campaign might be felt by the business.
Vaughan, you may recall working with me to bring together several disparate IT organizations in order to enable some transformational enterprise level initiatives (ERP, CRM, Y2K, etc.) We “branded” the new organization “eIT” (for “Enterprise IT”) and used that overarching theme to create a shared vision within the organization and throughout the enterprise.
While it would be hard to argue with the theme’s usefulness in aligning the IT team with the vision and the ultimate business outcomes, I was late to recognize that we had created a strong undercurrent of resentment amongst certain “C-suite” managers who felt that the real agenda was to create a separate IT “empire”. While we recognized the potential for that we nonetheless created barriers to future collaboration with those leaders. In retrospect, we fell into the trap of assuming that our branding “message” of partnership with the business was successful. That was a significant error that should have been avoided – after all, some of those same managers had lost their absolute control of IT resources in the creation of an enterprise level IT organization.
So, the CIO must balance branding of the internal IT organization with an oversized emphasis on making sure that IT behaviors clearly reflect an ethos of partnership with internal clients. This hard work is made more difficult by the fact that the CIO must continually walk the razor’s edge of partnership and governance. That isn’t easy.

By: C K Venkatraman

C K Venkatraman — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 03:28:03 +0000

Interesting. I would say that this was true throughout history of Commercial computing.