Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 42, Reply C, by Bob Mead:
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 95 14:27:26 -0700
I don't know yet whether or not this is a "good" marketing IS marketing story, but I can share what we've doing in the PeopleBase program to address marketing and communication issues. First, we made the decision last year to trade-off a technical resource in order to hire a full-time communications/marketing professional. The idea was to provide us the bandwidth to do some effective and consistent communications to the personnel community. We've only had the individual on board for about 8 months, but I think we're already seeing some benefits. Our initial focus has been on communications regarding specific application roll-outs (e.g. COLRS for salary planning), but we're now beginning to focus on some higher level elements. He has also improved the quality of communications being sent out by our managers, simply by reviewing messages before they are sent. Second, I make a regular effort to communicate information to the personnel managers. Pete Petersen holds a quarterly meeting with about 35-40 personnel managers, and I present information on status and future plans at almost every meeting. In addition, I'm now sending out a voice mail message to the sector-level level personnel managers every 2-4 weeks with updates on pertinent information (e.g. status of HRMS roll-out, info on any major problems, etc). These have been well-received, and are forwarded on to other people in their organization. One last comment: I also read the article in CIO, and thought it was quite good. The "CIO Confidential" commentary (back of the issue) in that same issue also had an interesting perspective on the perceived value of IT. I thought the comment that "Value is Visable. If you find you are spending a lot of time and energy measuring the value you're allegedly adding, you probably aren't adding very much." was a valid comment. We've wrestled quite a bit over the past couple of years with the financial benefits of what we're doing (especially with the finance types around funding time), and have concluded that many of the benefits we provide are very difficult to quantity (e.g. what's the monetary benefit of more timely and accurate information), and have discovered that while many of our users can't quantity the benefits, they do in fact believe they are real and valuable. Regards, Bob