April 2014

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on April 11, 2014

IT Communicators Virtual Coffee Shophttp://www.educause.edu/wiki/virtual-coffee-shoppe MANY THANKS to Julie Gillis from Boston College for opening the Coffee Shop in Adobe Connect.Alison Cruess from University of North Florida welcomed everyone and led the discussion of two hot topics.

    • How we achieve respect in an environment where technical ability is given a higher priority than non-technical? Many times, the marketing and/or communications staff are not respected or valued by the technical staff. How do you deal with it in your institution? Carlyn from Rice talked about gaining respect gradually by working with entry level staff and lower level managers. Alison from UNF confirmed that respect comes from the top down. Leadership shows respect and requires other employees to show respect. Also, the place of the communicator within the org chart also indicates a level of respect. Alison reports to the CIO.

    • Use a lack of expertise as a strength. Steve at Duke says it is okay to interject "no, that is not how we'll do that. My job is to get your message out to the community and this is how we're going to do that."

    • Keri from UGA agrees. She tells people she is the translator, between the tech team and the end user.

    • Jennifer from the New School is their Director for Project Management and oversees communications in that role. She knows what the users are going to experience, and sometimes her experience with the new initiative influences her communications, forgetting that her users may have no knowledge of the initiative.

    • How is pay for your position compare with your technical colleagues?

    • Rebecca from Queens' University in Canada reported that all their positions were re-evaluated to bring salaries in line with competition and that included the marketing and communications positions.

    • Carlyn talked about how her title and job description were created when she was moved to a management position; the technical skills were specifically included in her job description

    • Tiffany from Pepperdine has no tech background - bio medical - and they have an inside joke, "if Tiffany can do it, we know the users will get it." She endorses that joke and says if that helps the IT staff

    • Jim from Indiana - South Bend - we're still new to this but we are working on our turn of phrase and language used in terms of things that matter to them (reduced customer complaints, ability to move onto the things that matter). We assist IT managers in rolling out their initiatives. For example, if moving to VOIP, we go out and find out what the customer's concerns are and relay them to the IT managers. By getting the people in the trenches to understand the value of communications and that we aren't just adding a layer of administrivia, we've been able to take away some of the "messy details" and secure. That's something I picked up from Stanford - "Campus Readiness" - at an EDUCAUSE conference and adapted the information in those slides. I highly recommend that to everyone. The Administrative Assistants will have a different set of concerns than say, faculty.

    • The person who communicates a message often becomes the person everyone goes to for concerns/detail - how do we handle this situation?

    • Alison introduced the topic by stating that as the bearer of the message, she gets a lot of questions directed to her about the initiative or announcement. I try to get those questions answered ahead of time by the IT managers. We use a 5 sentences guide for our messages. Then I link to a web page with the rest of the information on it. Sometimes things change, even after you've sent something out. You can change what you need to on the fly on the web page so users see the most accurate and recent information on the web page. But not all our updates get a web page. Say a Banner update or HR update doesn't get a web page. For the Heartbleed bug, we definitely used a web page.

    • Carlyn talked about using the helpdesk email address as her reply-to in all announcements.

    • Rebecca at Queen's University uses a signature block or blurb on all messages that directs everyone to the Help Desk.

    • Jeff at MSPP also uses a similar tag line.

    • Becky at Valpo University said she is working with the Help Desk, sometimes the Help Desk doesn't have the answers after she's sent out an announcement. Their users have a tendency to reply to her no matter what she puts in her message. Phishing is a real problem, at least one person a week seems to fall for it. When a customer gets a message saying it is from the IT department or the webmaster, the users continue falling for it. We're trying to educate our customers on how to tell the phishing message from the real ones.

    • Susan at Yale, not having too many problems with Phishing messages because we installed Proofpoint two years ago and it does a great job of blocking those. But Yale has its own inhouse web site and we post our authentic messages.

    • Alison at UNF, we have a daily digest that goes out, Osprey Updates, from our Public Affairs department, which is also posted on a web site in case people lose the email. Customers can to there to read communications from any dept on campus, including IT. We try to not use direct email to anyone. We do still have issues with students, they are on Office 365 and if they are getting a storage increase or other change, we brand the email and use the same generic email address to send messages to individual student addresses. We also educate the community to hover over the sender's address to reveal the real sender. If it is not a unf.edu address, that is one way to tell it is no real.

    • Steve at Duke confirmed most organizations face the challenge of sending messages out to the community and trying to help them figure out how to tell real from fake messages. Previously used notes OIT.duke.edu and we post authentic messages on the home site. We aren't sophisticated in our Help Desk site yet, but we will get there.

    • How are you handling all the random questions you get from customers because your name is known?

    • Becky at Valpo's boss told their unit to not hide behind technology, to meet the customers head on when they reach out for assistance, then at the end we can say, "and the next time you have a question, you can contact the Help Desk."

    • Jim at IU South Bend. Sometimes my group ends up in an ombudsman role if customers don't like the answer they received from the Help Desk. We can ask if they spoke to a Help Desk manager and learned if the customer bumps up the Help Desk chain, they will often be satisfied (or get a more understandable answer) so our calls have dropped significantly.

    • Lucinda at Sacramento State says the Help Desk runs our the Change Control meetings, so they are very in the know.

    • Alison at UNF starts up tickets with the Help Desk for customers that contact her directly, as a subtle way of shifting the caller to the correct channel.

    • What has kept you so busy this spring?

    • UNF - Osprey Eyes - a secret shopper program. 4 students visiting 27 different venues before they close or open and go online to give a rating. Do we make students feel like they are a priority. We're collecting data through next week and will then meet with cashier, help desk, registrar and share data. Although Alison reports to the CIO, these departments are not all on IT systems - it is more of a collaborative project with venues under the department of Finance that are student-services like dining, parking, ID cards, etc. Doesn't cover university police, it isn't a campus-wide project.

    • Jennifer from the New School, moving everything out of Novell into Active Directory and identity management. A long project and one that is a challenge to communicate. Pushing applications is different, working with the executive assistants for VIPs to get their computers converted. Looking forward to the closure.

    • Wendy from the Culinary Institute of America is coincidentally working on the same thing, Novell into Active Directory. (laughter - we should have started a support group! Jennifer and Wendy will connect off line.)