How “Sticky” is your IT Brand?

by | Feb 16, 2015 | Branding, Leadership, My Blog, Personal Branding

sticky-brand-christa-pusateri

(Photo Courtesy of http://www.freeimages.com/profile/tilfeldig )

Imagine you are a network operations guy (system admin of Apple.com, a little VAX computer on the Internet, with no web then, and manager of the computer room), working at Apple in 1985. You catch wind of chatter that Apple execs are in the market for a Cray Supercomputer. You are curious about how they will support this new, massive, super-computing beast on the current network, with the minimal team you have (you). Naturally, you go to the office of the Director of Software Engineering for the MacIntosh to find out if the rumors are true and hand him your business card, which you audaciously have given yourself the title of “Manager of Engineering Computer Operations”

In true Apple fashion, he says, “Yeah, and we have a meeting about it this afternoon.”

Almost as afterthought he adds, “Why don’t you come to the meeting?”

You show up to the meeting expecting to be a fly on the wall. As the meeting ensues, you ask a few critical questions like: “Have you thought about the network requirements? Implementation plan? Talent needed to run and support it?”

And so on.

The next thing you know, you are not only nominated to lead the network design, but the design of the whole computer room, installation of the Cray, selecting the front end computers (two large VAXen), and working with Apple facilities to build out the computer room, leading the team to support it, AND get all of the facilities installed. Oh yeah and connect it to the existing Apple network.

Welcome to leadership! Good luck!

This is one of the most interesting and memorable stories from my conversations with senior IT leaders last week, shared by Richard Herndon. Richard is a tenured IT and security professional with extensive experience in IT,  Service Operations, Disaster Recovery, and Service Transition processes in multiple environments (most recently Manager of DR & Security Assurance at Disney). He is now exploring opportunities for his next adventure.

We got to talking about the importance of defining and building a brand for yourself, your team and your department (especially in IT and Information Security) that is truly “Sticky”. While most IT professionals tend to naturally want to fly “under the radar”, in today’s world of corporate restructuring, personal branding and promoting your value and expertise to the business is crucial to avoiding long stretches of unemployment or “transition”.

“From my experience working for some of the most Iconic brands, I learned the value of purposefully creating and building your brand and  promoting your value to the organization.” – Richard Herndon, Experienced IT Leader (Formerly at Walt Disney World, Apple and other leading IT shops)

 

If you’re not sure what your Brand is, you will want to find out. See my post “Your Personal Brand Story” for more on personal branding. The important thing to remember is that you have to know yourself, your goals and current perceptions of yourself in order to begin the art of promoting your brand. Also, don’t forget that you can promote yourself until your face turns blue, but your brand will always be your reputation, so you have to build it upon doing hard things well and consistently delivering on your brand promise.

If you’ve read Chip & Dan Heath’s book, Made to Stick, you may remember the book’s outline of the acronym, “SUCCES”,  which outlines characteristics that make an idea (or an IT department or individual (you)) “Sticky”.  You can find out what that stands for by reading the ADHD version on Wikipedia. I am  going to discuss three of the six characteristics of a sticky idea here in a Problem/Solution format, as my brain tends to gravitate toward solutions.

3 Stories to Illustrate Sticky Characteristics

      1.  Keep it Simple:

Problem: One experience Richard discussed was joining an IT department with a less than stellar brand for customer service. He found out quickly, that one of the biggest complaints was that people would call for technical support, and no one would respond. After some digging, he found out that the opposite was actually true. In many of cases, the IT support employee would get the call, then go to the physical desk/location of the caller to troubleshoot. Only when he arrived, the user had stepped out (no doubt frustrated by computer issues affecting productivity).

 Solution: To work on the brand image,  they designed a “Sorry I missed you” card the IT support staff could leave in case they missed a customer. The card included IT department logo and direct contact info. This way, if they missed the customer, she would be aware that they had been there. This was a simple solution that began the arduous process of improving their IT department’s image.

2. Do Something Unexpected:

Problem: At Apple, Richard was part of the ECO (Engineering Computer Operations) group, which was essentially a shadow IT department that supported the engineers. As in many companies today, people didn’t always know what the IT department did, or appreciate the services they provided to keep everything running smoothly.

Solution: While the group was not part of corporate IT, it  was good at promoting the work they did for the engineers. They even went as far as staffing a booth at the all company information fair and handing out fun T-Shirts to brand their group. When the corporate IT did a customer satisfaction survey that year, the ECO (Engineering Computer Operations) was ranked as #2 highest ranked IT service (remember, the group was not even in IT), second only to the Apple Icon drop down that allowed them to access the employee directory.

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 Photos courtesy of Richard Herndon 

3.   Make it Concrete:

Problem: One of the magical things about Disney is the fact that Disney employees pride themselves on performing miracles so that the guests never see any problems that arise. This also can be challenging when leading Disaster Recovery efforts and asking business line leaders what would happen if their department, data or assets were lost or went down to quantify the risk for the business impact analysis. When you ask “What would happen if your services went down” the answer would often come back as “That would never happen because we would find a way to keep them up.”

Solution: In order to build a successful Disaster Recovery Program that documented the business processes and DR plan for 142 mission critical applications, he had to make the Disaster Recovery Program he was building more concrete. Instead of asking, “What would the business impact be if this happened” he would “What would you do to fix things if a disaster occurred?” to get to the true business impact analysis. He then quantified the costs involved for disaster recovery. The resulting program enabled verification and testing of SOX and PCI compliance and decreased PCI returns from 50% to 5% in 6 months. He was also able to successfully transition the program to a third party consulting vendor partner.

 Throughout this blog, I am illustrating the last ‘S’ in sticky by relaying stories to empower the idea that your brand, whether it is department wide, team wide or personal, it is up to you to define, shape and nurture.

The Bottom Line: If you don’t define it (in a good way), you will either be forgotten (Remember what’s-his-name in IT?) or worse – it will be defined for you (The department of ‘No’).

Added Bonus- Here are some IT leaders who have done a nice job investing in their personal branding and thought leadership:

 Want to discover other ways to help yourself stand out?

If you are a senior IT professional, you can leverage the stories and expertise of your peers through joining Wisegate’s Invitation Only personalized IT advisory service and using our knowledge system and concierge team to personally connect you to peers who can help with the answers you need, when you need them.

Please also share your creative branding ideas for IT and InfoSec leaders with me below in comments, or feel free to connect. Please use my email address: Christa.Pusateri@Wisegate.org when you are sending me a relevant and creative request!

 

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