Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfieldon March 24, 2010

Building Organizational Identity

Pepperdine - does anyone specify groups within IT in your communications or marketing, or do you just use "IT" as a whole?

Case Western - presenting IT as a single brand. Not having silos again or any more.

Rice - same as CSRU: single face for IT

Case - an external audit revealed the same thing, the rest of the university doesn't know or care individual groups in IT, they just need to call IT.

We started reviewing institutional web sites versus IT web sites.

Back to building team and organizational identity...

Case - it really begins at the executive level. If the leadership requires communication and team membership, the rest of the organization will follow.

UTEP - when our CIO left for another university, the campus leadership decided not to replace him and now the silo directors all report up to the VPs.

Oklahoma State University - 6 years ago, we had a major re-org which combined several departments, the 5 years ago, we had another change. I've been here 15 years, so I've seen the silos built and combined through the years. When I became director of my group, I made the rule that we are all "IT" and we are going to communicate together and make this work. It won't be "that was a telecommunications problem" because we are all here to fix the problem.

Rice - we weren't communicating with the community much at all, so we didn't have to overcome the blame game. Once we began communicating consistently, our VP decided that all communications had to be channeled through one manager and/or director to maintain the "one IT" theme.

UTEP - when our Help Desk became known as the "Helpless Desk," it came from our own people. We've worked hard to get past those silos.

OSU - working hard with all the directors, learning their passions, what bothers them. You need to know what they need in order for you to support their communication needs.

Case - these are all interesting observations, thanks for sharing your lessons learned.

UTEP- we're having an identity crisis since we still call ourselves IT but when you get to our web site, it doesn't say that. Our VP is also over instructional technology. That title is VP of Information Resources and Planning.

Rice - is anyone else facing organizational challenges? Do you have a strong leader who can say "we are all on the same team" and enforce that?

Case - we hired an Associate Vice President and Chief Operating Officer in January for IT and the team membership is core to his vision.

Rice - after a lot of turnover in our top IT leadership position over about a decade...we got someone who was willing to walk tall into bad situations. In a lot of ways, he was like a sheriff going to a gunfight. He was willing to draw the first bullets, but he also expected us to all be behind him as a team. He accomplished a lot for IT - additional positions, making everyone's salary line competitive in the marketplace, funding for major infrastructure upgrades including a new network, storage system and data center. But we all had to play as a single team, or else. If he was on his way into a meeting to ask for more money and email went down, he didn't point fingers at us in public, we all were to blame. He also shared the credit with the entire team if we got accolades for something.

UTEP - how are you all handling project management? Sometimes I think we are kept in the dark so we don't publicize that they are behind (not that we would).

Oklahoma - it's kind of like being a mother, you have to to know what each person needs. You work off-line and behind the scenes to build relationships

Q: is anyone having trouble building relationships with peers in your IT group?

Mike - my position has changed recently and I am wearing a different hat now. We are all starting to be held accountable and we have a group that is measuring performance availability, accountability. We took a first cut at what we thought were our critical services and we went to the counsel (representatives of each major group in the university) and a tech counsel (faculty representative) to rate the services. Then we went to our peers and asked, "what's a reasonable" number for availability for this particular service. Then we began developing dash boards that are publicly visible. We were able to show in a window of time that showed a high number of outages with thousands of hours of downtime.

Back to the person who referenced the "Helpless Desk" it is usually a sign that we are telling the Help Desk staff what they need to know.

UTEP- our help desk has been developing their own series of web pages so that they have the answers they need.

OSU - You are right, the Help Desk is only as good as the information they get so we are putting our knowledge base in a wiki and rolling it out to our help desk and all the support staff. We also created an external blog and a calendar. IT announcements.

Buffalo - If you get leadership at the very top and you get everyone to rally round that, it goes far to building the team.

UTEP - I like the idea of an internal news blog or space. We have "bad stuff announcements" and we have an incident log page, who took care of it, what happened, etc. but we

don't have an internal communication tool. Something like "we're taking that live today" would be nice.

Rice - our change control group meets three times a week, max 30 minutes per meeting, and it was open to anyone in IT who wanted to attend, but 2 of our 5 directors had to attend and the managers for the Help Desk, infrastructure, networking, etc. Then they said, it would probably be good

Case - internal survey for all of IT staff, how do we define customer service - about 30 questions, pulled from an ECAR publication. We are going to be careful in our definition of customer service, then go to the campus and see how they define customer service, then come back to the division and do a gap analysis. The reality is, at the end of the day, we have to be customer focused and deliver services based on what the campus needs rather than what we think they need. We probably have been too prescriptive, we keep telling them what they need.

Rice - We are right in the middle of a new process that mirrors what Case is discovering about finding out what our customers need. Each spring, we always ask our faculty what they need as far as software for their courses and labs and we never get a very good response. A new director thought we needed a more personal touch, and we should hire some student workers who would call every faculty member until they made contact and got their software list, but we all came to the conclusion that wasn't the best use of our resources, so we tried several different approaches. Finally, we heard from several faculty members that they needed to see the list of software they had already requested or were using in their courses. So we created a database and tied all the courses to the software that either a department had requested or that the individual had requested and sent out their course/software summaries asking them to circle the software they still needed or to add to the list. The response in the first three days has been phenomenal. So, like Case Western has said, by giving your customers what they want, you get a much better relationship with your customers and a higher likelihood of success in the future when you need them to take a specific action or give you a response to help you play IT strategies better.

UTEP - we found the same thing. The faculty members started saying "I really need a microphone, I need something when the lights are out." So now, we are much better about providing what they say they need instead of what we say they need.

Chat Notes

• • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: (verbal request) Please use the chat to show the title of your highest IT leader.

  • Melanie - UTEP: VP of Information Resources and Planning

  • Mike - CWRU: VP of Information Technology Services & CIO

  • Mike - CWRU: We also have a recently hired Associate Vice President and COO

  • Melanie - UTEP: He is over Instructional Technology, the Library, IT, and Institutional Evaluaton, Research, & Planning

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: at Rice, our VP is Vice Provost for Information Technology

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: If you have examples that you can share (outage calendars, blogs, etc.) please paste the links in the chat

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: Rice service dashboard - https://my.rice.edu/ITAppStatus/

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: Rice - wiki for Help Desk, also available to Rice community (and public) - http://docs.rice.edu/

  • Melanie - UTEP: UTEP IT news to campus: http://wiki.utep.edu/pages/viewrecentblogposts.action?key=ITNEWS

  • ITCOMM CG Leader 1: Rice - Change Log or calendar - http://change.it.rice.edu/

  • Mike - CWRU: Lisa - can you take your phone off hold?

  • Melanie - UTEP: I don't remember if I mentioned that the IT News wiki info can be read on the Wiki or on our web page via RSS feed.

  • Melanie - UTEP: Our web page has been updated to reflect the new organization too: http://admin.utep.edu/it