The IT Department shouldn’t “come with the furniture”

The teams’ innovation quickly became the underpinning message of each article.

“He was the engineer, they came with the furniture” This was a quote from Bruce Springsteen on his first encounter with Jimmy Iovine in the Netflix docuseries, The Defiant Ones. That caught my attention because I started my professional career as an assistant engineer. One of my tasks was prepping the same 2-inch tape machine that he was working on. Eventually, in a stroke of luck, he was offered the recording engineer’s chair for a session, and the rest is history.
Now that my journey has led me into the world of solutioning and supporting IT departments for various organizations, I’ve come to realize that sometimes the IT department also “comes with the furniture.”

If it seems to work flawlessly, the user thinks it just works, meanwhile behind the scenes; there are long hours and lots of planning to keep the systems running smoothly. So, how do you motivate that team? How do they get their kudos for a job well done when the job well done seems to everyone else as almost uneventful?

You Innovate.

A VP of IT recently came to us to develop the design and publish a quarterly newsletter focused on the successes of the IT team and the projects that have quietly (and some loud ones too) deployed with success. We thought it was a great idea to highlight the team, although they may be more comfortable behind the screen than in front of the camera.
The content was a mix of the technical story, the improved processes, and content that had to look natural and kept readers engaged—using actual images of the user, the IT team, the huddles, and even some metrics to show usage increases and adoption.
From the camera gear used in the recent town hall broadcast to the custom software solutions, the teams’ innovation quickly became the underpinning message of each article. The articles were serving the dual purpose of informing the organization of the excellent work of the IT team while giving recognition of a great job on all these various projects.
The innovation of the IT team became the underlying message of the newsletter, something that we in the world of IT solutioning understand all too well. With an effective communication vehicle like the quarterly newsletter, their work won’t blend in with the furniture again.