Tom Dolan had an identity crisis on his hands. In 1995, the executive vice president and CIO of Bethpage, N.Y.-based Cablevision had merged the corporate IS staffs of the company’s cable TV, retail and entertainment venue businesses into a single corporate department. But three years later, hardly anyone in the company saw it as a unified team. There was watercooler talk that his staff was insular, loyal to their old business units?Cablevision’s cable TV service, The Wiz’s electronics stores, venues Madison Square Garden and Radio City Music Hall?and heedless of the greater corporate good. A survey of end users found most had little confidence that IS understood their business needs, much less who to go to if they wanted a project done.

At New York City-based Viacom, then-CIO Tom Espeland had a similar problem. In 1994 he brought the IS staffs of two big business units, Showtime and MTV, under the corporate umbrella after Viacom had acquired those companies. As Joe Simon, Viacom’s senior vice president of enterprise services, tells it, Espeland (who is now CIO of Bertelsmann eCommerce Group) needed to advertise the fact that IS would address enterprise needs while reassuring the individual business units that their needs would not be ignored.

Both men chose a strategy more common to selling consumer products than internal corporate services: They branded their IS departments. While not yet a common practice, marketing experts say that promoting a brand image for IS?and, more broadly, mounting a sustained internal public relations campaign?can help address a host of management challenges, among them business-IT alignment, budget approval and building support for big, company-transforming projects. And trumpeting IT successes can help balance the negative internal press generated by failed projects. Branding, its proponents say, can be useful not just during reorganizations but in any situation in which a department’s success depends on how much it’s trusted.

But branding can also backfire. At Cablevision, some early missteps threatened to increase internal resentment of IS, though today Dolan deems his Corporate IS brand a success. Meanwhile, Viacom’s current CIO, Joe Seibert, discontinued the company’s InfoWorks brand last year, following a merger with CBS. He concluded that internal customers no longer saw the group as part of the company but rather as outsiders ?no different from an IT services vendor.

It’s pretty obvious when a brand backfires, experts say. But how does a CIO know if a brand is a success? "You’ve established identity and image," says Howard A. Rubin, executive vice president and research fellow at Stamford, Conn.-based Meta Group.