Marketing is a necessary and integral part of running a smart IT organization. Yet while most CIOs would heartily agree that it's important, far too few effectively market IT. Even in the midst of the ongoing image wars so many CIOs are fighting within their companies, the prospect of actually marketing IT remains surprisingly controversial.

For this month's CIO Habitat, we delved into the subject of IT marketing and began by asking respondents a basic question: "When you arrived at the company, did IT have an image problem?" Just about every CIO today has walked into a broken IT shop.

Our research indicates that large-company CIOs are closer to winning the image wars than their midmarket brethren. Our data suggests that the image problem plaguing 70% of midmarket CIOs could be reduced by IT marketing initiatives.