Now in Marketing after 15 years of managing technology infrastructure I have gained insights into the similarities and differences between IT and Marketing. This post is first in a series of four posts.
Let’s begin the first in this series by giving Marketers a quick view into IT. Users, that’s what IT calls customers, tend to think of IT as what they see on the monitor (Outlook, Word, browser, business apps), but so much more goes into providing services including disaster planning, security, documentation, auditing, training, support, reporting, network management, disk storage, vendor management, IT operations systems (ITIL), expense management … the list goes on and on. I offer four things that Marketing doesn’t know about IT.
4 things Marketing doesn’t know about IT
- IT is pressured to maintain standardization in order to manage costs. In their heart of hearts many IT people would love to give you the device you need/want (hey, they want them too), but IT is held accountable for what it costs to provide technology services. Internal customers don’t often bear the burden of cost, IT always does. Complexity and non-standard systems cost money in support and administration.
- IT is typically measured by how well it maintains services (not necessarily on how quickly it changes). You may wish to be on the latest-greatest versions of Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, but IT has limited resources and supporting many versions of software puts a great strain on available resources.
- IT serves many masters. It must juggle the #1 priorities for Marketing, Sales, Product divisions, Finance, etc. As well as maintain hardware, software and the daily administration of systems and services. If business partners takes the time to discuss departmental priorities with IT, then IT better understands what is needed, but IT still has to weigh everyone’s needs and make the best decisions it can.
- IT works all the time – seriously, they are always on call.
So how did I do?
If you’re a Marketer, did you know these things? (and if you did I wonder how deeply you understand them). IT, what else doesn’t Marketing know about you? Let me know in your comments.
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Commenting on my own blog (How lame!), but I just saw this and I’d make it #5. From @YouFailatIT: Just because you work in IT doesn’t mean you can do everything IT-related.
I didn’t even think about IT is “measured by how well it maintains services”. Seriously, it’s obvious, but at the same time you don’t even think about it. I’m always asking for something new but I don’t realize that they’re maintaining massive SQL tables an archaic server and so much more (and so much that’s more important than my requests).
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