IT Marketing Management: Of the People, For the People, By the People…
Monday, May 3, 2010 at 8:15PM 
Putting the People Back into People, Process & Technology
The father of continual improvement, W. Edwards Deming, once exclaimed that “Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.” I feel like what we have done, whether it be Service Management consultants, practitioners, tool vendors or the ITIL governing body itself, is made a multitude of lofty statements, provided great depth on process guidance, trained people on that process guidance, developed very broad and deep tools, and then expected everything else to fall nicely into place. What ITIL touts, right from the start, is that to be successful with IT Service Management it is going to take "People, Process and Technology" and that the primary goal of Service Management is to foster IT and Business (read Customer) alignment. How do you foster IT and Business alignment when you first need buy-in from that very same relationship that we have just admitted is not aligned? If true success, as Deming notes, comes from deep and trusted relationships with our customers, how have we so missed the mark in our Service Management efforts to day?
To answer this question, let’s look at Marketing and IT, both separate and then together. You might initially look at this pairing and immediately see “Apples and Oranges”, “Hot and Cold”, “Not even closely related!” Maybe. Opposites in many respects? Absolutely. To even consider these two topics together (let alone a convergence of the two), let’s first take a quick step back and lay the groundwork for what they each are and claim to attempt to accomplish.
Marketing is the process by which companies determine what products or services may be of interest to customers, and the strategy to use in sales, communications and business development. It is an integrated process through which companies create value for customers and build strong customer relationships in order to capture value from customers in return.
Marketing is used to identify the customer, to keep the customer and to satisfy the customer. With the customer as the focus of its activities, it can be concluded that marketing management is one of the major components of business management. - Wikipedia
There are and have been and continue to be several key aspects that help to define Marketing. Briefly, they include both lists of P’s and R’s.
4 P’s of Marketing
Originally coined by Harvard professor E. Jerome McCarthy in the early 1960s, this simple model has 
dominated much of the way marketing has operated ever since. Marketing decisions generally fall into the following four controllable categories:
- Product:
- Price:
- Place (Distribution): Distribution is about getting the products to the various aspects of marketing communication, that is, the communication of information about the product with the goal of generating a positive customer response.
4 (or 6?) R’s of Marketing
A recent addition to the 4 P's is the 4 (or maybe 6) R's.
- Relationships:
- Returns/Rewards:
- Relevance:
- Responsiveness:
- Reputation/Recognition:
- Research:
These alliterated lists for Marketing (and every other aspect of business for that matter) will continue, no 
doubt. One addition or modification that I wanted to call out specifically that caught my eye, especially as it relates directly to the other topic under discussion, IT Service Management, is (of all things for Marketing) People. The suggested addition of People was but a recent inclusion to the 4 P’s. How it was not there in the first place, baffles me. Even the ITSM triumvirate of People, Process and Technology includes it and even leads with it.
IT Service Management is a set of specialized organizational capabilities for providing value to customers in the form of services. ITSM frameworks, such as ITIL (the IT Infrastructure Library), note that you need both People and Tool capabilities to ensure the Process and Practices committed to are successful. Yet not one of those same frameworks were built or meant to directly solve the PEOPLE or the TECHNOLOGY capabilities. Without going much deeper, I believe the Process focused Technology arena is pretty well spoken for, but the PEOPLE and relationships side? Not even close. ITSM frameworks, to their credit, have tried to provide some direction and answers, but the story and actual hands on approach is woefully incomplete. Here below are some of the current common Service related elements addressed by current documented good practices and how they interact with the business:
- Service Management – What IT does to the Business
- Service Requests – What users can get from the business
- Service Levels – Agreement between the business and IT as to service delivery
- Service Catalogue – What Services the business can use
The void is that there has been nothing on “how” the Service is actually presented and delivered to the customer who needs it. We do not know or understand our Services let alone know and understand how to Market them. The entire user experience from start to finish is IT centric, and yet the people and users involved have changed. Gone are the individuals who sit in awe of IT professionals. Instead users are now savvy consumers of IT where the products of the consumer market are endless, easy to reach and use. In their non-work environment they know what is out there and how to use it, but within an organization it is like going back to the dark ages or a land where prehistoric giants amble about unaware of the impending meteor strike.
We have all heard, read and probably used the comments that IT needs to "frame it in their terms" and we need to “know your customer and speak to them in their language.” Talk about lofty goals. While absolutely the right goals, our collective IT organizations are nowhere near ready, able, or skilled to frame it and communicate it effectively in our stakeholders’ language and terms. Let alone know what the message is or needs to be. Our business stakeholders get a different message today whether they are talking to the Service Desk, an IT project manager, the CIO, architect, or vendor. What kind of message does that send to our organization's stakeholders that are the REASON why we exist within IT in the first place? It says that we in IT do not know what we are doing, that we are incompetent or even worse “don’t care”. We need to, as has been very nicely pointed out by numerous practitioners and thought leaders, address our People deficiencies both within and across IT, and to the rest of the organization; and not just at the Service Desk or just at the CIO office, or just for our project managers, or just between applications and infrastructure.
In addition, training your people in ITIL, ISO20000, or Project Management and building an ARCI chart does not count as ‘addressing’ your IT people capabilities or the required relationships to foster Deming’s referred to success. Unfortunately, this is precisely what we have been sold by the ITIL ‘industry’ as what is needed to address your people. I do not believe that this was maliciously done, but its effect has stunted our growth and is exactly what is now keeping process success and deep dynamic tools hamstrung. Worst of all, our immaturity and ignorance on the people and relationships front is keeping us as Service Providers from truly fostering that alignment that is so desperately needed!
So where does that leave us? Both IT and Marketing have forgotten the importance of the reason why both exist: People.
From a strictly IT perspective, we need to look to apply the key marketing tenants presented above to our Internal IT Organizations and the related relationship of our Services to our customers. If we fail to ‘fix the face of IT’ and effectively market ourselves and our capabilities to the rest of the organization and ultimately build the relationships necessary to dialog, engage, and align, we will not have the communication avenue with our stakeholders to ensure our resources are being put to the most effective and efficient use. If perception equals, or at the very least, drives reality, then our challenge is to meet perception problems facing this dysfunctional relationship and meet them head on.
To effectively address the People side of People, Process and Technology, and effectively market IT, we need to make a concerted and strategic effort across IT to intentionally:
- build what we do as a brand
- understand who our customers and critical stakeholders are
- develop the message(s) that we need the organization to hear
- identify the current capabilities of our people to communicate these messages
- develop those people and our use of social media and communication tools to ensure we can effectively voice that message
- be strategic in pushing that message out to our community
We simply MUST directly address the people, politics, and customer relationship aspects of Service Management head on, whether currently functional or dysfunctional. We must do this intentionally and with purpose, before we will be able to truly realized the value that we should be able to achieve from the effective use of ITIL practices, ITSM technologies, project management practices, governance frameworks, and so on. Otherwise, our gains in supporting our customers and developing IT Service Management capabilities will be minutely incremental, highly inefficient, stalled at any given moment, hamstrung, costly and demoralizing for our teams. This, at its root, is all because we have a broken relationship with the key individuals in, across and outside of IT that are mission critical in defining, directing, and measuring what success is.
Bob Lewis of Infoworld puts it very succinctly:
“I know this is going to sound like I'm channeling Dr. Phil, but it's still the right answer: In spite of all the panaceas out there -- ITIL, COBIT, CMMI, and so on -- relationships and trust come first. Without positive relationships and trust among participants, no process can work, all governance will be ineffective, and even the best employees will be hamstrung -- tied up in conflict, bureaucracy, and rework.”
No question that, at a minimum, it takes People, Process and Technology efforts in order to succeed as a Service Provider in the delivery and support of IT Services to our users. As a result, we must be extremely careful in how we approach the relationships with our people and ensure that we are not just giving lip service to this side of the success factor triumvirate.
After seeing that even Marketing has forgotten the People and taking a brief look into everyday life, maybe ITSM is not too far behind the curve. As we in our everyday lives focus more and more on Process and Technology, we now find our children glued to the TV, people camping out overnight for the hew iPad, we find our factories outsourced and/or completely void of creativity, and our airports ruled by process and systems thinking. Oh how I long for the day where you lived to run outside and see what friends were also outside looking for you. Can Billy come out and play? Can Sally and I come down the street every day to your house? IT and Marketing, converged or still just separate could learn a life lesson or two from a People focused ways of thinking and may even find some success at the other end.
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Reader Comments (2)
Excellent discussion! This is so true. I hear so many people tell me that the HARD part of all of this is getting the people to follow. Of course. Excellent marketing and communication creates common vision. Where there is common vision, there is strength and purpose.
A very excellent piece. Job well done. I'll likely link back in an upcoming post of my own. I've often said "people, process, technology -- in that order". When we work it backwards is when all goes South. Very much behind your ideas.