Your Users Are Also Your Clients
You may not think marketing and sales are parts of IT management very often, or at all, but as an IT manager, you must be prepared to address these areas too. Fortunately, effective, comprehensive IT management can help you do so successfully, and increase user satisfaction and productivity and IT business value.
Every time you launch a new IT-powered application, resource or service, its broad and rapid adoption by intended users drives its success. To maximize adoption, you must do more than simply toss the new offering into the marketplace.
You must also promote your new application and encourage your target audience to buy and use it, before, during and after the launch.
Such marketing and sales efforts may be unfamiliar and uncomfortable, or both, for you and/or members of your IT management team. The alternative, however, is to risk limited adoption, incidents of “shadow” and “rogue” IT, greater user dissatisfaction and negative perceptions of IT at your business. These can come back to haunt you and your team during performance or budget reviews.
You and your team must borrow a page from the handbook of your sales and marketing colleagues. Treat your users like clients. Not customers. Clients. The difference? Someone becomes a customer after only a single transaction. A client is someone with whom the provider has a continuing relationship. Your IT users are all clients. You and your entire IT management team must learn to treat them as such.
ITAM + ITSM = CRM (Client Relationship Management) for IT Management
Your marketing and sales colleagues should be able to help you craft and execute effective outreach efforts. Examples range from regular emails to blog posts and on-demand podcasts and webinars.
To succeed at delivering what your user-clients want and need requires asking for help from a different, but likely more familiar source. Your IT Asset Management (ITAM) and IT Service Management (ITSM) tools and processes can tell you much about what your users use, how they use it, and how well it serves their needs.
From Asset Utilization to Incident Management and trouble ticket volumes, these and other data points and insights can help you know more about your users’ real-life interactions with the resources you deliver and manage.
If your IT management team already owns and manages a Configuration Management Database (CMDB), then it should be the source of the information you use in these efforts.
If you don’t already have a CMDB, then the ability to consolidate and rationalize your IT management information and translate it into actionable reports and guidance may be the single most compelling reason to build a CMDB.
Compared with traditional vendors of business IT solutions, you and your team have several significant advantages. You already have a defined market that’s ready to do business with you and you already have a portfolio of offerings. Perhaps, most important, you have access to detailed information about the needs, preferences, and behaviors of your audiences.
Use the data your ITAM and ITSM solutions generate to know your audiences, and transform them into happy clients. You, your team, your users, and your business will all benefit.
Virima: Your Partner for Successful IT Management – and Marketing
Virima’s solutions for IT Asset Discovery, ITAM and ITSM are designed to tame your biggest IT management challenges. They can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and the interconnections that link them to one another, your applications and services and your users.
In addition, they’re built to be easy to use and configure and to produce useful, actionable reports about your IT environment..
Virima is here to help. To get started, contact us today to schedule a demo and explore the possibilities!
