IT department? IT support? Help desk? Those labels are so last year for some companies who have decided to part ways with the terms in a bid to rebrand their IT department.
The renaming of IT departments across industries is part of a reputational facelift for the oft-maligned sector. Martin Sirard, an IT support manager at Workleap, told IT Brew that his company recently rebranded their IT department as the “IT experience” team, a change that came shortly after the team transitioned to being supervised by HR.
“If it was just reflecting what we were doing, we’d probably be IT support,” Sirard said. “But I think because we want to bring this further with the change that was made…IT experience made perfect sense.”
Meanwhile, Joseph Puglisi, a growth strategist and fractional CIO at 10Xnewco, and Paul Zyla, CEO and senior fractional technology executive consultant at Purlin Horizons, told IT Brew that they have both made the decision to rebrand their IT departments to the “business technology department” several times throughout their career to reframe IT as a more business-focused operation.
“It’s all about the business,” Puglisi said. “It’s not about the wires in the wall or the blinking lights on the console. It’s about sales and customer experience.”
IdentITy crisis. Martha Heller, CEO of Heller Search Associates, told IT Brew that IT departments with titles as quirky as celebrity baby names are not a new phenomenon, saying the wave of identity rebrands is due to the unsung hero department’s battle with finding its footing within its organization.
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“Since the beginning of IT, IT has struggled with how to name itself,” Heller said. “This has been going on for a very long time and the reason is that the IT department has always for some reason been separate from the rest of the company in many ways.”
Heller said she has heard a range of new titles emerge in recent years for IT teams—such as the “technology” department, “digital solutions group,” and other data-emphasized labels—as companies increasingly try to demonstrate that IT and technology are “central” to their business.
Name tag. IT leaders who spoke with IT Brew about their department rebrand shared many positive outcomes that have emerged from the decision. Puglisi told IT Brew that he witnessed a “dramatic change” in the perspective of his teams whenever he pursued a department rebrand at previous employers.
“It puts us on a similar footing with other departments in the company and certainly as a technology leader, it earns you a lot of respect for stepping up and being a business leader and not being just a technology nerd,” he said.
While some have regarded their department rebrand as a good move, Heller warned that organizations looking to do a similar change must make sure that they are making an effort to integrate IT into their business alongside it in order to reap the full benefits.
“Putting lipstick on a pig is not going to help,” Heller said. “You’ve got to actually change that animal.”