In 2001, a member of the senior leadership team at Harley-Davidson, invited to an IT town hall meeting to articulate business leadership’s view of the IT function, described it as "a big black box that you pour lots of money into and pray good things come out." For IT coleaders Laurel Tschurwald and Reid F. Engstrom, the black box metaphor was a painful wake-up call. "We had always thought that everyone knew what we were doing and valued our contributions," says Tschurwald. In response, the two launched a campaign to demystify IT. They brought in senior business people to review and manage all IT project requests. They initiated internal service-level agreements, IT financial audits and quality-improvement programs. And to make sure everyone heard about the value IT was delivering, they started publicizing their efforts in quarterly "enterprise status reports." The reports recap each initiative’s business case, strategic alignment and associated metrics, and summarize the status of every project valued above $100,000. It’s a "key marketing vehicle," Engstrom freely admits.

The idea of marketing IT makes a lot of CIOs nervous. Sure, they’re willing to treat their business colleagues as customers, and some have no qualms about charging those same customers for IT services. But launching a campaign to trumpet IT’s value, communicate its costs, and promote its products and services? Well, that feels a little too hucksterish to your average IT executive. Besides, who has excess money lying around to invest in marketing?

But marketing IT internally may be the secret ingredient fueling CIOs’ efforts to run IT like a business. We say secret because on average, less than half of the CIOs who say they run businesslike IT shops are actually taking advantage of marketing, according to CIO’s survey, "How to Run IT Like a Business." Yet, those respondents who have attained such prized and elusive benefits as enterprisewide visibility of IT value and cost, improved customer loyalty and increased IT staff productivity do more marketing than does the general survey population?in fact, as much as 25 percent more. These IT leaders are building thematic, targeted campaigns around IT initiatives and branding projects to increase awareness and build momentum and buy-in. And they’re using a range of communication vehicles to bring the message home that IT is run like a business?one that brings verifiable value to the enterprise.

"Marketing is absolutely critical to being internally successful," says Stephen Norman, COO of Merrill Lynch’s technology group. "We live in a world where by and large our customers don’t understand what we do. So we need to market internally to have a shot at building partnerships and avoiding surprises."