Chapter 5. Marketing and Communications

Understanding the company's mission, its linkage with the IT functions, and how the task of determining and defining the services will be initiated, is essential to delivering a set of integrated enterprise services. Gaining early support from all the key stakeholders is another requirement for success. The most basic and essential prerequisite to marketing and communicating the IT story is having a history of delivering quality, cost-effective, valuable services on a timely basis. Given that these vital initiatives are accomplished, marketing and communicating of the product, and delivery of integrated enterprise services, is critical to ensure that maximum organizational benefit and return on IT investment is achieved.

A Gartner Research note, "Marketing the IS Organization: Questions and Answers," published 26 September 1996, defines marketing from an IT perspective: