Ever filled out one of those vendor “satisfaction surveys” with confidence that it would impact your future happiness?

As Jonathan Kass, CIO at VPI Pet Insurance, notes in this week’s Expert Opinion, for mid-sized companies, each vendor selection is “as strategic and as important as every new hire.” You have to go beyond a vendor’s standard set of references and claims of customer satisfaction to ascertain how the supplier will fit with your organization and culture.

Inward Looking

But you also have to be just as willing to assess how well your group is servicing the needs of your business. Forrester Research’s Bobby Cameron makes the case that you need to think less about IT and more about BT – business technology. With BT, he asserts, business organizations within a company “directly contract for solutions, configure their own processes in ERP and analytics systems, or employ Web 2.0 technologies like blogs and wikis.”

In other words, they’re not going to line up at IT’s door saying, “Please Sir, can we have some more?” So unless you’re focused on making the transition to that of an enabler rather than an implementer, you could quickly lose relevance inside the business hierarchy.

Marketing Your Services

Becoming more a businessman and less a technologist requires that you build a full portfolio of business tools, including financial expertise, management, and marketing!

There are many definitions of marketing, but most center around meeting the needs and wants of customers. When you’re managing IT in today’s business, everybody is a customer, whether they’re external or internal. So your job ultimately relies on satisfaction.  “It's not about hype. It's about conveying IT's value” was the way one story put it last year.

Let’s Not Forget the People!

While we’re on the topic of satisfaction, let’s not forget the worker bees! How happy are your IT employees? As a recent story in Computerworld proclaimed, “The recession and its accompanying reorganizations, layoffs and corporate turns to outsourcing have been corrosive to IT employee job satisfaction.” After all, meeting the needs of your “customers” depends on you having the resources to apply to the tasks at hand.