Accommodate Different Departments’ IT Needs

As chief information officers may have already noticed, the demand for their information technology departments’ services throughout various portions of their companies has risen dramatically in recent years. With innovative tools quickly becoming an appealing option for just about every division imaginable, the necessity for IT staff members to assist in implementing and managing the most effective solutions possible for their colleagues is now a top priority. Whether it be for their businesses’ marketing teams or human resources representatives, CIOs need to be ready and able to lend a helping hand to portions of their organizations in need of IT.Tear down interdepartmental wallsTo assist other representatives throughout their companies, tech professionals will have to familiarize themselves with some of the bare basics of their co-workers’ objectives and current methods. They must break down the barriers between divisions within their companies to foster collaboration and guarantee that everyone is on the same page when it comes to employing technological advancements in an optimal fashion.”The refrain we often hear from businesses is the problem of the ‘siloed’ organization, which leads to lack of integration between different customer touch points,” Linus Gregoriadis of Econsultancy said to The Guardian. “Someone very senior within the organization needs a mandate to bang heads together and ensure cooperation between different departments.”By establishing ties with other parts of the company and reaching an understanding of their needs, CIOs can pinpoint which solutions would be best suited to help other departments reach their goals in an efficient manner.Know your marketers’s tech demandsHow much do IT executives know about marketing staff’s needs in terms of technology? In the age of digital marketing, these teams are encountering an increasing demand for certain tools that will aid them in learning more about their target demographics, optimizing their marketing material on different virtual platforms and measuring the success of all their initiatives. Taking this into account and examining these elements in depth, CIOs could determine an IT course of action to render their colleagues’ campaigns successful.The first aspect with which tech professionals should help their marketing counterparts is analytics. Marketing teams can come up with all kinds of material and share it with the world, but if it is not strategically geared toward a specific audience, chances are that it will be so generic that it will not have an impact on anyone. To prevent this from happening, marketers must have facts and figures revealing the behavioral patterns and preferences of their intended audience – information that can only be acquired through data and analytics.”Having analytics in place to tell you which devices customers are trying to use to engage with you on is one of the best ways to inform your investments,” Jamie Brighton of Adobe explained to The Guardian. “In an extreme example, maybe all your customers are business people using Blackberry devices, so building an Android version of your app makes no sense – without the data you can’t make this kind of informed decision.”In light of this fact, CIOs should make moves to equip their marketers with the right tools to cultivate a comprehensive database featuring stats on their target consumers. By taking this one step further and analyzing the information compiled in these databases, IT professionals can allow their marketing departments to comprehend the nitty-gritty details, which would enable them to produce more effective campaigns.HR could use data, tooFortunately for CIOs, data technology can also be leveraged for their businesses’ HR divisions. Throughout nearly every stage of HR, professionals in this field could also benefit from having a wealth of information about job applicants and existing employees right at their fingertips.According to Forbes, HR representatives could employ IT to keep a real-time database on everyone’s skills and performance over the course of their stint with their companies. By continuously updating these troves of statistics, HR staff members can then apply different analytical functions to the raw data so that they can have a clearer picture of how each employee is doing compared to the rest of the organization. Equipped with this information, HR personnel can make educated decisions when it comes to doing everything from reviewing salaries, putting someone up for a promotion or even identifying employees who are experiencing issues. For this reason, CIOs should make their indispensable IT know-how available to various departments, which will ensure that everybody has the tools they need to dominate their jobs.