By Hank Marquis

IT Needs a Marketing Department

Image Credit: pexels.com/@fauxels

IT needs a Marketing Department—a digital services marketing department—because today, IT needs more focus on consumption, on experience, and on how employees actually use digital services.

As technology standardizes and entire suites of applications become cloud-hosted commodities, the human element of IT becomes the critical path for IT. And this transformation is only accelerating. This is one of the reasons I created Hailee—to show how AI can help IT see the human side clearly instead of guessing.

More than ever employees rely upon IT and the digital workplace solutions it brokers and provides. With this increase in usage comes increased dependency, which places significant new burdens upon the consumers and producers of IT services.

Yet the complexity and ubiquity of modern IT services conspire to create a murky situation in which understanding which hardware, software, network, and human resource does what, for whom, when, and why is nearly impossible. Cloud makes this situation more opaque. Instead of focusing on technology, we need to focus on people, employees, and digital employee experience—exactly what Completely Satisfied argues for.

While most IT leaders don't make arbitrary decisions regarding allocating resources, they increasingly make decisions in a knowledge vacuum.

It may seem obvious to "focus on the consumer" in IT today, but discovering consumer perception and expectations can be challenging. For this, IT needs new approaches. IT needs product/service quality perception tools that show consumer value in terms of results, moving past sentiment to experience with demographics and marketplace statistics, and psychometric analysis to complement operational metrics. This is the same logic behind Hailee’s digital twin approach.

Psychometrics in an IT marketing context is the application of psychological measurement techniques to better understand digital employees' needs, preferences, and motivations when it comes to the IT digital workplace solutions and services they rely upon.

Many IT leaders believe they know what's best and fully understand the requirements placed upon them. In reality, the IT systems' complexity masks employee needs, resulting in dissatisfaction with IT and frustration from the business and IT.

IT services are intangible. Still, most IT managers continue to think and operate using physical or product-oriented terms. IT managers are only now beginning to understand that as IT becomes a commodity, how to lead it needs to change dramatically.

In such a turbulent situation, IT managers need a framework to help them identify where they are most likely to get the best performance from their limited resources. And that framework is services marketing—consumer demographics and psychometrics. This is a core theme in Completely Satisfied.

Understanding consumer demographics and measuring IT service quality from a consumer perception perspective is required for today's IT service providers to remain relevant and successful.

Companies today demand competitive advantage from their IT investments. Still, many view their IT as "necessary" — a necessary evil — and most feel poor IT quality limits the business. As a result, most IT managers are frustrated and struggle with strained business relationships.

IT managers need new concepts, principles, and skills. We need tools to measure product/service quality, analyze results, communicate findings, justify improvements, develop actions, and apply practical solutions to overcome challenges. We must seize opportunities to empower business success by treating employees as paying customers. AI-powered tools like Hailee make this possible at scale.

And these solutions aren't based on IT operational metrics, workflow frameworks, or even tools that map IT operational metrics to business processes.

The tools we need are here now, and they work.

They're digital services marketing tools, processes, and best practices.

That's what I think. What do you think?

Please comment or reach out and let me know what you think, I'd love to talk with you!

Best,
Hank

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