Yesterday was my first day as Social Media Manager at Jetstar. Yes, that means I have a new job :)

For those of you who might not know, the Jetstar Group (usually just referred to as Jetstar) consists of four low-cost airlines:

• Jetstar Airways, based in Australia,
• Jetstar Asia Airways, based in Singapore,
• Jetstar Pacific Airlines, based in Vietnam, and
• Jetstar Japan, based in Japan.

Jetstar was launched in 2004 and, with its 79 aircraft and over 7,000 employees, currently flies to 56 destinations in 17 countries across the Asia-Pacific region.

My job is a Group role (i.e. it’s a corporate function that works across all four airlines) and is based at the Jetstar corporate headquarters in Melbourne, Australia.

Why did I change jobs?

For a number of reasons:

• I love the airlines/aviation industry and working for an airline is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.
• Jetstar is a great brand that is run by good people who provide a valuable service. It’s a brand I respect and is a brand whose values I share (i.e. providing good value for money, making smart use of technology, and making travel to popular destinations accessible to lots of people).
• I’m making a career path adjustment that sees me changing my focus from building and managing websites to helping companies and customers communicate better with each other using social media. And while this is a slight narrowing of focus (e.g. in my current role I won’t be looking after the Jetstar website) it is also an increase in overall responsibility (i.e. I get to work on more strategic corporate communications objectives).
• My new role is more challenging because the scale and scope of customer engagement is greater (e.g. it’s across the entire Asia-Pacific region as opposed to just within the state of Victoria) and the aviation industry is more exciting, more innovative, and moves much faster than the water industry.
• I have a greater opportunity for personal growth because I now get to employ my social media skills to their fullest. I had been wanting to increase my social media focus at Melbourne Water but, with all the other work I was doing there, this wasn’t something I was able to do.

I also get to work with one of my former managers who I really like and work really well with. And finally, as someone whose family is spread across multiple countries, the travel benefits of working for an airline are important to me personally.

What does the new job involve?

Broadly speaking, my overall objective is to improve the communication, engagement, and understanding between Jetstar and its customers. Specifically, I get to do this via social media. Though, practically speaking, this engagement will be integrated across multiple communication channels.

How exactly I go about doing all this is something I will share on this blog (and probably also on Twitter) over the coming weeks, months, and years so stay tuned.

I gave a quick overview of the ConnectNow conference in Part 1. Here are my thoughts and notes – along with links and other information – on each of the talks given during the first two days of the event.

Gavin Heaton

• Topic: Lead Generation, Community Management, and ROI (blog link)
• Website: http://www.servantofchaos.com
• Twitter: @servantofchaos
• Big ideas:
  • 10 years on and the Cluetrain Manifesto is still relevant and is still not accepted business practice
  • There are different types of social networks and these are used by different types of people, of different ages, at different stages of their lives; see Groundswell’s Social Technographics report that talks about 6 types of social media users
  • There are 5 impacts of new/social media (read Gavin’s blog post for details)
  • There is a convergence of markets: there used to be just the consumer market (mass production) and the enterprise market (custom-built) but now there are enterprise-level products and services available at lower prices (e.g. Software as a Service) and the consumer space is being extended into the enterprise (e.g. smart phones like iPhones in the workplace)
  • You need to have a continuous digital strategy (details in blog post)
  • You need to share the message, but own the destination (case in point: I’m sharing Gavin’s message but sending you to his home base, which is his blog, as the source/message destination)
  • Social media is not about influence, it’s about trust (details in blog post); your trust and reputation can have a ‘fat value’ (details in blog post); 75% of your “fans” are already connected
  • From the Q&A session that followed, a good idea: Consider converting your company’s brochure content into a series of YouTube videos that tell a great story and can also be shared

Katie Chatfield

• Topic: Do You do your Best Work at Your Desk?
• Website: http://katiechatfield.wordpress.com
• Twitter: @katiechatfield
• Big ideas:
• Human behaviour is a function of a person in their environment (Lewin’s Equation); you can change behaviour by changing the person (very hard to do) or their environment (easier to do)
• Before you can get into social media, you need to have a more social business
• Giving people a tool doesn’t make them craftspeople; i.e. it’s about the people, not the technology
• Remember that competent people resist change because it makes them less competent
• Short form stories (3 minutes long) are a great way for employees and teams in an organization to tell each other what they’re working on [“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough” – Albert Einstein]
• In those short stories, you should tell people: (a) what it is you’re working on; (b) why you think it’s awesome; and (c) why it’s useful for them to know about it

Tara Hunt

• Topic: Yes, I do Mind the Gap
• Website: http://www.horsepigcow.com
• Twitter: @missrogue
• Big ideas:
  • There tends to be a gap (sometimes a big one) between what businesses and communities value
  • For example, truth, beauty, freedom, and love are not usual business values; though notable companies like Google, Apple, Craigslist, and Zappos (respectively) present exceptions
  • The businesses that share more community values tend to do better
  • Most businesses are online community tourists: they watch, but they don’t participate (they’re not from there; they’re just looking at the ‘natives’)
  • Watch Barry Schwartz’s TED Talk on the loss of practical wisdom
  • Many businesses create strict guidelines to follow, thereby instilling robot values over human values into their staff; why?
  • We need to de-robotize; we need to start the human revolution
  • From the Q&A session: Why not ask your fans what’s important to them? What do they value?

Hau Man Chow

• Topic: The Future of Mobile Apps
• Website: http://www.motherapp.com
• Twitter: @motherapp
• Big ideas:
  • You can convert any site into a mobile application using MotherApp

Brian Solis

• Topic: The Human Network in an Interconnected World (presentation notes)
• Website: http://www.briansolis.com
• Twitter: @briansolis
• Big ideas:
  • All we know about social media is based on opinion; it could all be wrong
  • Executives don’t usually get into social media because of an ‘a-ha’ moment; they often get into social media because of an ‘uh-oh’ moment (read ‘Championing Change from Within’)
  • We – the people in this room – need to be the conductors of our organization’s social media
  • Who in an organization owns social media? Everyone.
  • Your organization needs a style/brand guide for social media
  • Talking back and forth with people if fine, you need to show that your organization has empathy
  • Become the people you want to reach and inspire
  • Conversation is bigger than any social network; check out the Conversation Prism
  • Social media is more about sociology and psychology than it is about technology; we’re becoming digital anthropologists
  • Check out the Brand Dashboard

Laurel Papworth

• Topic: Social Media: Where’s The Money?
• Website: http://laurelpapworth.com
• Twitter: @silkcharm
• Big ideas:
  • Reputation and trust are crucial in the online world
  • When you calculate the ROI (return on investment) on community engagement don’t forget to calculate the COI (cost of inaction of community engagement) as well (details in blog post)
  • You can monetize social networks via numerous revenue streams (details in blog post)

Jim Stewart

• Topic:  Video for SEO and Inbound Marketing
• Website: http://stewartmedia.biz
• Twitter: @jimboot
• Big ideas:
  • Watch the video, ‘How Kevin Bacon Cured Cancer’
  • Old media missed lots of opportunities with online news; such as reporting on local trends, creating time-sensitive local ads on the web, and real community-building
  • Video creation isn’t very complicated or expensive: light it up from above ($20), mic it up ($100), frame it up, use good software (free to $300 for screen capture software like Camtasia Studio)
  • When making a video: (a) tell a story, don’t ready a script; (b) try to have a point
  • Distribute content far and wide via services like TubeMogul (which is good, but still buggy)
  • Make sure your video includes a call back to your home base
  • Make sure you transcribe your video

Darren Rowse

• Topic: Blogging for Dollars – Do You Have What it Takes? (presentation notes)
• Website: http://www.problogger.net
• Twitter: @problogger
• Big ideas:
  • Blogs often make money indirectly (i.e. not through straight ads or affiliate marketing)
  • There are ‘4 Foundations of a Successful blog’ (details in blog post; also see presentation notes)
  • But, if you want a long shortlist: you have to (1) listen; (2) identify goals; (3) build a home base; (4) build trust; (5) be useful; (6) build community; (7) be personal; (8) tell stories; (9) be unique; (10) build a network before you need it; (11) leverage what you have; (12) craft your content well; (13) be playful; (14) be transparent; (15) be accessible; (16) be passionate; (17) promote yourself, but not too much; (18) be prolific; and (19) persist
  • Remember: sometimes the money comes later; don’t just make money from your blog, but because of it

Gary Vaynerchuck

• Topic: Crush It! Cash in on Your Passion and How to Use Social Media to Grow Your Business (presentation notes part 1, part 2)
• Website: http://garyvaynerchuk.com
• Twitter: @garyvee
• Big ideas:
• The cost of entry to build a brand has collapsed; e.g. to build WineLibrary.com, it cost $4m in advertising over a number of years while, to build WineLibraryTV.com, it cost almost nothing
• The value of content has never been higher; “When your content is shit, you’re fucked”; that said, monetizing content is tougher than ever
• Spend time in communities; you have to love your community before they’ll love you; this is the thank-you economy
• Customer service via social media is key; the price of your product can get neutralized by caring
• The cost of entry is: (a) caring, (b) social media customer relationship management
• The only three things that “move the needle” are: (a) price, (b) convenience, (c) customer service
• Social media spokespeople for your company need to know your brand story cold
• Two ways to solve the personal vs. corporate brand issue for company spokespeople and customer service people: either (a) don’t let your people develop a personal brand and become heroes or (b) become a platform to make heroes (under your logo) and attract increasingly better people when/if current heroes leave the organization
• How do you convince people (e.g. in an organization) to do something (e.g. participate in social media)? Don’t spend any time on selling to people who don’t want to do it. Spend all your time and effort on people who want to do it and then promote them. The rest will come around.
• Focus on social trends and culture shifts; the big trends these days are virtual goods and currency (e.g. via Facebook); smaller and more mobile is better (because we’re lazy); geo-location
• The money these days is in restrictions (e.g. Apple and Facebook)

Deborah Schultz

• Topic:  It’s the People, Stupid (earlier presentation version; presentation notes)
• Website: http://www.deborahschultz.com
• Twitter: @debs
• Big ideas:
  • There is a blurring of our work and personal lives; social media is becoming our ‘third place’
  • The social web is not about information provision or telling and selling, it’s about relationships, people, and making connections
  • We’re weaving the social web together; it’s an explosion of the personal in an online environment
  • We live in a culture of sharing, and sharing is easier than ever before
  • We live in a relationship economy in which transactions are by-products of healthy relationships
  • Through the social web, we’re seeing the death of the grand gesture; e.g. companies will ignore you all year till they launch their seasonal/annual advertising campaigns, after which they’ll ignore you again
  • There’s a new framework for the new social web: (a) organic over static; (b) emotion over data; (c) relationships over transactions; (d) continuums over grand gestures; (e) intentions over attention
  • We’re all becoming, looking for, and aspiring to be Tummlers (also see TummelVision podcast)

Stephen Johnson

• Topic: Social Media Monitoring and Building Brand Advocates
• Website: http://arcanelogik.com
• Twitter: @huxley
• Big ideas:
  • The first and most important thing to do when you get into social media: listen
  • Do you know what motivates your customer?

Panel Discussion

Big ideas:

• It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure (Clay Shirky)
• What’s important is your company’s reverse elevator pitch; i.e. what your customers say about you and your brand after you have left the elevator

Michael Specht just completed a blog post series on ‘Social Media as Part of Background Checking’ during the recruitment process:

• Part 1 (Access to a unique view)
• Part 2 (Research into cultural fit)
• Part 3 (Legal issues)
• Part 4 (Bringing it all together)

I personally think that social media checks – or, at the very least, Google searches – are an essential part of recruitment. And I think that goes both ways:

• recruiters and companies learn all they can about candidates
• candidates learn all they can about recruiters and the companies they’re applying to

This is important because:

• both parties get to find out more about each other
• both parties get to assess cultural fit
• candidates get to show off their online portfolio and social media participation

While the last point is certainly vital for people working in Internet-related industries, it is also becoming increasingly relevant for people working in other industries (as more of their lives move online).

Microsoft have a good case study on how their technology helps Melbourne Business School with their information management and stakeholder management needs. With the tagline of “Business School Enhances Reputation Through Improved Constituent Service” the executive summary reads:

Melbourne Business School (MBS) was founded in 1954 through the University of Melbourne, and its graduate degrees have been ranked in the Financial Times’ list of Top 100 Global MBAs since 2005. The school wanted to strategically align its brand positioning message, ‘Global. Business. Leaders.’, to every facet of its business. Its well intentioned but departmental approach to managing data on students (called ‘constituents’) hampered efforts to deliver services and develop relationships to a standard that was commensurate with its brand. In 2007 MBS began a comprehensive process of organisational change. It introduced a customer relationship management (CRM) system based on Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 4.0 and Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007. By introducing a common platform for data management and taking a life-cycle view of constituents, MBS improved communications with applicants, students, participants and alumni and projected a more professional image.

You can read or download the case study from the Microsoft Case Studies website.

I know this project well because I worked on it as a Content & Governance Consultant on the MBS Direct (i.e. web portal) side. It’s good to see that the project has been written up really nicely.

MBS’s CIO, Ric Lamont (who is quoted in the study) was one of my MBA classmates and a lot of credit goes to him and to Carl Joseph (Manager, Information Services) for pulling this off so succesfully.

(FYI: I read this case study when it was published last year but remembered today that I’d forgotten to link to it back then. If you’re wondering why I remembered it now that’s because it came up in my “melbourne business school” Google Alert this morning; presumably because its web page was tweaked or republished in a new format.)

I took a number of marketing courses in my MBA at Melbourne Business School (MBS) and it was during my Consumer Behaviour course with Brian Gibbs that we got the best, single-page overview of the marketing process.

Framework for Marketing Management

Gibbs called this the ‘Framework for Marketing Management’ and it’s an excellent summary of how marketing is done:

[Note: The diagram above is one that I made based on my notes from the course.]

It works like this:

• The marketing concept says you begin by looking at your customers, company, and competition – these are the three Cs. Let’s say your company makes pens:
  • Ask yourself what it is that your customers need. How can you satisfy that need? In real life a lot of research would go into answering questions like these. Then consider what your customers do to satisfy those needs. What factors contribute to their decision making process? Again, more research would be done.
  • Also look at your company. Can you make the pens your customers want? Do those types of pens fit with your company’s corporate objectives? For example, if you’re Montblanc, you won’t be making cheap plastic pens anytime soon even if some your customers say that’s what they want in a writing instrument.
  • Don’t forget to analyze your competition as well. How will your competitors respond to your product (say, when you introduce a new version)? Also ask yourself who else satisfies the needs of your customers. For example, should you be looking at companies that make markers and pencils as competition?
• Once you’ve done that, you segment your customers according to primary bases, such as their identified needs. For example, Group A wants cheap plastic ballpoint pens, Group B wants fancy liquid ink pens, and so on. You also segment by secondary bases, which are often things like demographics. You keep slicing and dicing using a combination of bases till you get useful segments; i.e. those you can target properly. For example, you could further segment Group B by age bracket and annual income.
• Next, you decide which specific segments you’re going to target (and why). For example, Montblanc may be targeting only, say, richer and older people from Group B. They know they can communicate well with these people, they can defend this segment from the competition, and ultimately that’s the area of the market they want their company to operate in.
• That sets you up with the positioning of your product. Getting your positioning right is incredibly important because it’s the key to your entire plan. So, for example, Montblanc may position themselves in the luxury space as a company that sells excellent writing instruments that have the highest level of craftsmanship. In effect, their pens are high-end gifts, much like hand-crafted jewellery. They would then position themselves appropriately in the luxury gift jewellery markets, but not in the broader writing instruments market.
• Once you’ve got your positioning done, you figure out how you’re going to to create, capture, communicate, and deliver value to your customer. This value is created by the existence of your product, captured by its price, communicated through your promotion, and delivered by where you place (or how you distribute) your product – these are the four Ps.
• Finally, as the market grows and develops, you will need to tweak these four Ps to maintain your positioning. Then, at regular intervals, you will need to re-do your three Cs because the market will change and you will need to change with it. Repeat ad infinitum…well, at least as long as your company continues to exist.

It All Comes Down to Positioning

As you may have gathered, a good way of remembering the entire marketing process is to think of the just the three Cs and four Ps. However, if you want to distil it further, you can bring it all down to positioning.

Positioning is a summary of the first part (analysis & strategy: the three Cs) and a guide for the second part (planning & implementation: the four Ps).

From the consumer behaviour point of view, it is also the psychological epicentre of the marketing process. That’s because positioning – with the help of the four Ps – is what translates the ‘actual product’ into the ‘perceived product’ within the consumer’s mind (they are often not the same).

So while a Montblanc pen is in essence just a writing instrument, in the mind of the consumer, it is much more than just that. And it is the pen’s positioning that will determine what qualities above its ability to put ink on paper set it apart from its competitors.

Thanks for Sharing, But What Was the Point?

This one-page overview of the marketing process is useful in many ways:

• It provides a great sanity check for what you’re doing in your job. For example, the Web & New Media Strategy that Melbourne Water developed over the last year followed pretty much this process. That strategy now forms the basis of my day-to-day work. So, if we hadn’t done the three Cs right, for example, I would have had a hard time getting the four Ps done properly.
• It’s a great way to analyze the marketing, branding, and product positioning that’s going on around you all the time.
• It brings good overall project management and business strategy rigour to whatever it is that you’re doing.

Oh, and if you’re a job seeker, it’s particularly useful because it provides a good framework for when you get asked questions about the company’s products or services.

Ever wanted your resume to stand out – and I mean really stand out – from the others? How about making it an infographic?

[Source: ‘Resume / Infographics’ by Michael Anderson]

For more, read ‘16 Infographic Resumes, A Visual Trend’ by Randy Krum on the Cool Infographics blog.

I am very tempted to convert my own resume into this format. I wonder how long it’ll take and what software I can use to do it.

I’ve been at Melbourne Water for over six months but haven’t yet blogged about what I actually do there. So, thanks to the end-of-year holiday season that has given me the time to get back into blogging, here goes.

What Do I Do There?

My job title is ‘Websites Manager’ and that role sits in the External Affairs team which itself is part of the broader Communications & Community Relations group.

My tasks include:

• Managing all of Melbourne Water’s websites (i.e. the main site and various sub-sites)
• Developing and implementing a Web & New Media Strategy for organization (this includes getting the organization involved with social media)
• Helping knowledge specialists from across the business create and maintain their web content
• Proactively seeking content to place on the web (this includes content that site visitors want to see and content that we want site visitors to see)
• Liaising between our web solution provider and the rest of the business (including, sometimes our own internal IT department)
• Managing the Website Advisor (who focuses primarily on the online needs of the Waterways group)

More generally, my job involves three things:

• Tactical management: Managing web content and being the go-to guy for everything related to the web (and, increasingly, multimedia and social media).
• Strategic management: Finding out what our current online presence is, determining what we want that online presence to be over the coming years, and figuring out how we’re going to get there. This includes doing things like a complete site overhaul and pursuing new online models of stakeholder engagement (specifically, social media).
• People management: Overseeing work done by the Website Advisor and managing the web team’s relationship with the rest of the organization.

That’s a lot to do but I’m having an awesome time doing it. If it didn’t keep me so busy, I almost wouldn’t call it “work”.

What’s it Like to Work There?

It’s awesome. I love the people, I love the culture, and I love the commitment everyone has to their work, to Melbourne, and to the planet in general. It’s really great to work alongside people who are experts in their fields (many of them are geeks like me) and who love the work that they do.

I really appreciate the fact that the organization truly cares about, and cares for, its employees. And I love that we don’t have to leave our lives (and the rest of the world) at the doorstep when we step into the office.

I love the range of work that the organization does – everything from:

• sourcing and storing water,
• treating and providing water (to Melbourne’s private water retailers), and
• taking care of our rivers, creeks, wetlands, and (soon) coastline,
• to collecting, treating, and safely disposing of our sewerage.

Finally, I am impressed by the importance and emphasis the organization places on good communication and stakeholder engagement. Indeed, excellent stakeholder engagement is a core strategic objective for Melbourne Water. I am particularly empowered by this focus because so much of that communication and engagement is moving into the online space (including social media) and that’s specifically what I am responsible for (and really enjoy doing).

So, You Like it, Then?

Yes, very much so!

The AFR’s BOSS magazine recently published the results of its biennial rankings of MBA schools in Australia:

• List of 18 Schools Ranked in Survey
• Overview article: ‘Standard Bearers’ by Rose-Anne Manns (difficult to read online)

I haven’t bought the magazine and read the detailed results myself yet but Manns’ article lists the top five schools as follows:

1. Melbourne Business School (University of Melbourne)
2. Monash University Graduate School of Business (Monash University)
3. Macquarie Graduate School of Management (Macquarie University)
4. Australian Graduate School of Management (University of New South Wales)
5. University of Western Australia

The rest of the article was too painful to read online so I only skimmed through it and, therefore, have nothing further to say. Clearly they want us to go buy a copy of their magazine.

By the way, 22 business schools and 1,732 b-school alumni took part in the survey that these rankings are based on.

Excellent slideshow on social media by Marta Kagan (of the The Secret Diary of a Bonafide Marketing Genius blog). Language is NSFW…well, depending on where you work and what your team/organization’s culture is.

Enjoy :)

[Via A Blog Around the Clock]

A couple of weeks ago Scott Arbeitman wrote about the technology gap between the street and the enterprise. Carl Joseph replied to that with one of the most painful technology-related quotes I’ve heard (painful because of how true it is):

“Every day you get to use new technology and are exposed to new, exciting things…then you go to work.”

I’m not sure who actually said that, but if you work for a large corporation, then you’ll know what this feels like.

How do I Deal with Such Restrictions?

At my workplace, in order to keep up with the rest of the Internet world, I not only bring my own personal laptop to work I also bring with me my own personal wireless broadband Internet connection. And, despite the fact that my laptop is ancient and the broadband connection is painfully slow (relative to my workplace’s connection), I still get a better Internet experience on it than I do on my work computer.

Why? Because even though my laptop has half a gigabyte of RAM, a slow 30GB hard drive, no built-in wireless adapter (yes, it’s that old), and Windows XP, I get to run on it the latest versions of Flash, AIR, Silverlight, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Seesmic Desktop (along with numerous other applications) and I get to access whatever I want to on the Internet.

On my work computer, meanwhile, I am stuck with no AIR or Silverlight, IE6 as my only browser (I do have a version of Firefox on it but that doesn’t run Flash so it might as well not exist), and restrictions on which websites I can access. What makes this harder to live with is that my computer’s hardware is pretty good (it’s a docked laptop with a dual monitor setup) and my Internet connection speed is excellent.

It’s Not All Bad

I have to admit, though, that I am being somewhat unfair to my workplace. Aside from making us run IE6 and blocking parts of the web (including sites like Slideshare because it’s “personal storage”), they do let us access webmail, all the social networking sites (indeed, according to our IT department, Facebook is one of the five most popular sites at work), and most online media sites (like Flickr and YouTube). Compared to other large organizations – particularly government departments – in Australia, that’s pretty awesome.

In fact, they’ve gone a step further and have provided us (the Web Team) with a special media desktop (for converting and editing video) and a special Internet laptop (with all the latest software and applications installed on it). Bits of the Internet are still blocked on these PCs because you’re still going through their proxies, but that’s not such big a deal.

So What’s an Employee to Do?

One way for tech-savvy employees to get around these restrictions is to do what I’m doing: circumvent the IT department entirely by creating a parallel setup for yourself. With recent technology improvements like cheap netbooks, powerful smart phones, and readily available mobile broadband, this is easy and relatively inexpensive to do. I suspect a lot of Gen-Y will take this route.

The other option – the much harder one – is to get your IT department to get rid of these restrictions and, dare I say, modernize itself. Unfortunately, that’s not easy to do. Slate’s Farhad Manjoo makes a good case for it, though, in his recent article, ‘Unchain the Office Computers!’:

…workplace IT wardens are rarely amenable to rational argument. That’s because, in theory, their mission seems reasonable. Computers…can be dangerous things—they can breed viruses and other malware, they can consume enormous resources meant for other tasks, and they’re portals to great expanses of procrastination. So why not lock down workplace computers?

Here’s why: The restrictions infantilize workers—they foster resentment, reduce morale, lock people into inefficient routines, and, worst of all, they kill our incentives to work productively. In the information age, most companies’ success depends entirely on the creativity and drive of their workers. IT restrictions are corrosive to that creativity—they keep everyone under the thumb of people who have no idea which tools we need to do our jobs but who are charged with deciding anyway.

The Role of the IT Department

One of the most important parts of Manjoo’s argument, however, is this:

What’s worse, because they aren’t tasked with understanding how people in different parts of a company do their jobs, IT managers often can’t appreciate how profoundly certain tools can improve how we work.

This is often the root cause of the problem because most IT departments are divided into roughly three parts:

• IT Operations: the people who keep the systems running
• The Project Management Office (PMO): the people who oversee updates, upgrades, and all the organization’s IT projects
• IT Planning: the people who plan for the future

What is often missing is the fourth part:

• In-house IT Consulting: the people who liaise directly with different parts of the business and use the latest technologies to improve the way those people work

Without that fourth part, IT departments have a hard time keeping up with what people in the organization believe are the most effective and efficient ways of doing their work. They also don’t keep up with the latest technological solutions for various business problems.

Modernizing the IT Department

So, if employees want to take the route of modernizing the way the IT department looks at new tools and technologies, they need to start by modernizing the IT department itself. And, to do that, they have to look at IT as two different groups:

• IT as a service delivery department: the people who provide us with our computers and networks
• IT as a partner in business: the people who proactively help us do our job better

And if they’re lucky enough to get a CIO who thinks that way as well, things should start to change.