No matter what your industry or job is, paticularly in IT, you market yourself whether you realize it or not.

Well, MYTH started as a joke. A coworker kept stopping by to ask esoteric questions about procedures and tools with Windows NT4/2000 and Exchange 5.5. Now, for these few weeks I would coincidentally have a tool or the location of the relevant Microsoft TechNet article handy. Finally she asked a question that I did not know the answer to, and she said, "Oh no, there goes the myth of Steven!". In the course of events, it was a good joke, but I got to thinking about it and turned it into a summation of my view of how to work within an organization.

So, Market Yourself To The Hierarchy was born (MYTH).

It's fairly simple. An IT professionals job is to provide the tools necessary for people to get work done. The servers must remain up and available, the email must continue to flow, the firewall must protect the network. People need to communicate over equipment you provide and, of course, it must ALWAYS work flawlessly. In the normal course of events, management does not know all the work necessary to maintain high uptime's. Eventually, if it works out, uptime and availability is assumed. When availability becomes assumed, the workload of an IT department can disappear to managements visibility. This can be a good thing, but has it's downside. Particularly when one has been making do with less and less as budget cuts, hiring freezes, layoffs hit and infrastructure maintenance and upgrades go unfunded. Many an IT professional does not know how to communicate this to their management. Many in the field do not see the need, lack the desire, or do not know how.

So, on to the philosophy part.

You need to market yourself to the hierarchy. This means management. It also means your coworker, both your immediate peers, those on other IT teams (network, desktop, server, application) and also various business units. Organization size varies, philosophy the same, approach tailored to your environment.

• Learn your profession. Be competent in your field. You will not and cannot know everything, but you can become good at what you do and become familiar with a wide variety of subjects that touch upon what you do. Learn to research the rest. If you do not know the answer, then do not pretend to know. Ask questions to refine what you are being asked (maybe you do know, just not with the requestors terminology). Web searches can be helpful. Your industry peers, etc. Enlist the requestors help.
• Share your knowledge. You are not indispensable. Ever. Even if someone says you are. There are millions upon millions of people on this planet and generally hundreds if not thousands in your field. Chances are, someone can do your job. It may be inconvenient for a company to replace you, but that doesn't mean they won't. Also, if you are viewed as 'indispensable' you can't be promoted, vacations can be interrupted and your options for assistance from your coworkers dwindles. So, your best bet is to teach and learn from those around you. Set things up so that processes and procedures are documented. Resources are known and locatable in emergencies by others. If you are on the server team, have at least a passing relationship with the desktop team members. That way when a position opens up, there may be someone you can hook upwards from within the company. Also, you are more likely to hear of problems before management does so you can fix them or address them or be prepared for when they do become an issue.
• Market yourself and your department. Publish your uptime's, pay attention at meetings you have to go too. If you hear of a project that might be bringing in application servers, see if your department can provide resource assistance. You might end up owning it, and it might not be the best solution with your existing infrastructure (True conversation -so, you bought a Dell server for your application and want IT to manage it for you? You do realize that our standards are Compaq Proliant and your Dell server won't fit on our racks and our monitoring tools won't see it?)
• Be accessible to management. Be honest with management. If you make a mistake, then state that. If you fixed your mistake, then mention that too. You managers will be far more annoyed with you if they are blind sided by outsiders with questions than if they can say, 'Yes, Bob took care of that email issue, the outage was only an hour and it turned out to be a hardware failure', then if they have to say, 'email issue? Um, I'll have to get back to you on that'
• Trace down rumors. If you hear a hallway conversation about how the servers are down again, or I couldn't get email, etc. I remember when new to an environment I sat in my cubicle in the cube farm listening to someone complain and complain over the wall about an email issue and no tickets were in the queue and the server was fine. Finally I went over and introduced myself. Asked if they were having an email issue, they appeared confused and said no, it was something that happened months ago. Ah, I reassured him that I was new here but please be sure to bring any issues to my attention and I would fix them. As I walked away I heard him ask his co-worker, 'What got him all worked up?' and she replied, "If I heard you complaining about our stuff over an incident that happened months ago like you just were, I wouldn't have been so polite.' Moral, be available and accessible. Old incidents' that key people won't let go can influence the perception people have about you, your department or company. You can't solve all of them but you can get most of them.

Note, this is an update of an old article I had around that never made it here.