Marketing your IT department to the rest of the organization can be challenging. There are personalities, skill levels, intellectual issues, and a lot of politics--a lot of politics--that come in to play.

By holding the top operating IT position--whether your title is IT Manager, Director of IT, or VP of IT--you are your department's representative to the rest of the company.

There are a lot of traditional methods for marketing your department to the rest of the organization. By "marketing," I don't mean selling IT services, but rather ensuring that the rest of the organization has confidence in your department.

One way to promote the capabilities of your IT staff is to offer a form of whitepaper, or "redbook" if you prefer that terminology. Have your staff write manuals for your various applications--transition manuals, in-depth how-to guides, and orientation manuals for new-hires. To do this, they should work with your end-users.

By working with your end users, your IT staff will learn more about their business needs. This can only help when it comes time to design a new application or maintain an existing one. It can also encourage good employee relations and, therefore, help you market IT to the rest of your organization.

One way to start promoting the IT department is to select an application--and an associated department--that has been challenging or difficult to support for the last few months or years. Then, assign a top-level staff person to that group to help create a whitepaper on that department's processes and procedures. This will do three things:

1. It will document their processes and procedures, which you will need for any new systems you might implement in the future.

2. It will help the IT staff know more about that part of the business than they may have previously known.

3. It will help the end user bond with the IT department at a level that's not achieved in many shops.

When the end users begin to bond with the IT staff on a professional level, the barriers that have prohibited your staff from accomplishing their goals will begin to be broken.

Bob Cozzi has been programming in RPG since 1978. Since then, he has written many articles and several books, including The Modern RPG Language --the most widely used RPG reference manual in the world. Bob is also a very popular speaker at industry events such as COMMON and RPG World and is the author of his own Web site, rpgiv.com.

Bob Cozzi is a programmer/consultant, writer/author, and software developer. His popular RPG xTools add-on subprocedure library for RPG IV is fast becoming a standard with RPG developers. His book The Modern RPG Language has been the most widely used RPG programming book for more than a decade. He, along with others, speaks at and produces the highly popular RPG World conference for RPG programmers.

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