Branding Your IT Department

Throughout my lifetime I’ve had the opportunity of being a member of various sports teams including rep soccer and competitive amateur rugby.  Looking back at these sporting experiences there is one thing that is etched in memory forever, one thing that made those moments unforgettable and worth every ounce of blood, sweat, and tear: camaraderie.  Striving to build that same level of team-spirit is a crucial aspect of any successful IT department.  At Fully Managed™, we’ve recently ramped up our own unique approach of building camaraderie via internal branding, making our Network Operations department a pseudo-brand of the Fully Managed™ corporate brand.  Welcome to the Hyena Den!

A symbolic definition of a Hyena from one internet source: “…a Hyena represents a descent into savagery..” a perfect summary of how we as a team approach every issue that is thrown our way.  We seemed to have rallied around the hyena moniker for a variety of reasons and from reading various online articles, we aren’t the only IT department undertaking the definition of their internal IT brand.  I recently read an article about the Oregon Department of Transportation and how their CIO, Ben Berry, has been working to define his department’s internal brand:

“At the Oregon Department of Transportation, CIO Ben Berry has been working for more than a year to redefine his IT organization and develop a plan to market the services it offers. The project will culminate this summer in the rollout of an interactive portal that, among other things, will trumpet IT's success in meeting service levels and provide a conduit for two-way user communication.

Splashed on the portal Web page, and on any communiqué emanating from IT, will be a logo and a slogan that -- Berry hopes -- will convey the essence of the transportation department's IT unit and sear it in the minds of users throughout the agency. "It's a new concept, but we're changing our culture, and it's something we think is necessary to make our customers aware of our services," Berry says”

In my opinion this approach to branding works best when delivering service to customers as collaboration and teamwork are daily activities and functions that are at their optimum when members feel like they are a part of a team but more importantly, a part of the end result.

Our internal branding initiative is in its infancy, we currently have a technical leaderboard (Hyenaboard) which is a graphical representation of the productivity by team member. This leaderboard sits on our overhead dashboard in our network operations area and can be reference by all team members with just a quick glance.  Due to stellar prizes being awarded each month, it provides team members with incentives and real-time metrics of where they sit within the rest of the team.  A little healthy competition never hurt anyone right? Here’s a sneak peak at the Hyenaboard™ (the names have been hidden).

As corny as it may sound, referencing the team as a pack of Hyenas seems fitting as I’ve seen guys put in 20-hour days without even flinching.  I’ve witnessed the destruction of almost 30 support tickets in one day by an engineer, productivity like this is inhuman, the technical-savagery is impressive considering the grace and poise exuded by engineers on the phone and by e-mail is the complete opposite when compared to attacking complex technical issues.

Teamwork is something I’m familiar with, having worked within many IT departments. While there has always been a certain degree of teamwork, an IT department can easily become fragmented due to scale, dispersed working environments, or intra-department segmentation (developers, systems engineers, storage analysts, etc).  Applying the idea of internal branding isn’t a new approach to building a team, but perhaps one that isn’t used enough within the IT space.  Having worked at the Canadian Tourism Commission for almost 4-years during the transformation of Canada’s national brand change, I witnessed firsthand the power of effective branding and its impact on customers, but more importantly the impact on the people that supported and worked hard to make the brand a reality.  Applying these same techniques to an IT department within the umbrella of an existing corporate brand not only builds camaraderie but also fosters an efficient work environment filled with high output staff members.