February 2010

Posted by Carlyn Foshee Chatfield on February 12, 2010

Building Relationships with your Customers

Virtual Coffee Shop for IT Communicators

February 12, 2010

Presentation by LeCarla Gilmere, ITS Senior Manager at University of Colorado at Boulder (see attachment for PPT slides)

Chat notes and links can be found at the end of this wiki page.

    • LeCarla was tasked with creating IT liaisons in every department on campus. Originally, 119 liaisons (Customer Service Reps) were identified, now have 365.

    • Began with one-on-one meetings; rapidly discovered follow-up and follow-thru is paramount to creating a relationship of trust.

    • Also began as a one-way and is now a two-way dialogue, particularly through quarterly IT Events and Tier 2 Tech Talks.

    • These one-on-one meetings are the most powerful tool you have. People WANT to be heard. You will learn a wealth of information regarding what they are struggling with. IT not always happy to hear about their problems, but are learning to listen better, better take the "temperature" of the campus on various issues or initiatives.

    • Part of being transparent is admitting when you have an IT issue.

    • Never Assume

    • Always Seek Input

    • Listen & Learn

Question and Answer:

A: How did you start? what were your early phone calls like?

A: I went door-to-door

Q: How did you identify the initial CSR?

A: Our chancellor instructed each department to identify one person for this role.

Q: How much technical experience do they have?

A: It runs the gamut, every role from deans to administrative assistants. Then you find out one person is supporting 400 machines! How does one person do that? I introduce them to tools or services we may have to assist them.

Q: Tell us more about how the CSR program got the attention of the Chancellor?

A: We had an organization called the IT Council and I was in a different department at the time. The decision was made based on the needs of the campus - someone in the department needed to be the liaison for the department in case there was an issue with networking, etc. It was really visionary. When Blaster broke out 4-5 years ago, we lose less than 100 computers to the virus. When UC-B was identified as a top campus to not fall to the virus, we were asked about how we did it and we pointed to the success of the CSR program in getting the word and patches out in time to minimalize damage.

Discussion

Mealnie - UTEP - we tried this and found that if IT paid the person, they became and "us" instead of a "them" and if the department paid them, the relationship was more what we wanted, but the departments never backed off on their departmental duties.

LeCarla - UC-B - did anyone from IT reach out to the group to make them feel IT is really involved in their pain and successes?

Melanie - yes, we had -- and still have -- a weekly meeting. We ask them to bring their issues, etc. Biggest problem was that they had to keep all their old duties.

LeCarla - again, I'd say "talk to them one-on-one" because you have a better chance of uncovering what is really bugging them, things they would be embarrassed for other peers to hear them say or admit they don't know.

Melanie - how many CSRs for a college?

LeCarla - in Arts and Sciences, we have three different CSRs. The School of Law is one department and has 3 CSRs. Engineering, depends on the degree. If people feel like they are not part of the program, they divorce themselves from the program. The quarterly events are well-attended. The spring and fall events are half-day events, the summer events vary.

Lisa - Albany - how long did it take to build this kind of wide-spread participation?

LeCarla - 4 years

Lisa - what is the balance between centralized and decentralized IT?

LeCarla - basic core services like email is what centralized IT provides. As a Tier 1 Research institution, we have a lot of decentralized IT. Not everyone is on our mail server, for example. One of the best outcomes of this program is the communication of what IT is doing and what the departments are doing.

Melanie - that's important. We found out that our library was going to go out and buy an antivirus tool because Purchasing called and asked us about it. We have a site license for anti-virus tools, but we wouldn't have even known the library didn't know about it if Purchasing

Q: Can you talk about the negative feedback from IT when you were designated as the liaison for all these CSRs?

LeCarla - it is a constant struggle and I constantly balance my approach. I definitely don't want IT to see me as "here comes LeCarla, advocate for the campus, now what monkey wrench is she going to throw at us?" I am working more with IT folks to help them see that the campus wants a purple tumbler and not the pink cup we're trying to make them take. I really try to communicate that we need the campus to buy into the services we want to provide to them. They (campus constituents) don't always see it as a benefit or improvement.

Cathy - Miami in Ohio - we developed a liaison program when we were changing over to the Exchange email program. We used one person in each department to be our contact and tell them when their department was going to move. We used a similar approach for our transition to VoIP. It hasn't been as much as success in the way LeCarla described for two-way communication.

Kirsten - Case Western - we used something similar when we moved all our faculty and staff over to Google Apps. I'm pretty new to the campus so I'm coming into this with no history. If a department didn't have someone technologically-savvy in their group, we asked someone to be the department representative who could help them make the transition or coordinate desk side support. It took several months to migrate the entire campus.

LeCarla - we actually offered training to the less tech-savvy CSRs (to anyone who wanted it) and they have grown with their tech abilities and been promoted, for example from an administrative assistant in their department to an entry level tech or tech I level position, still within their department. The departments were seeing the vitality and importance of these tech skills within their own department. And sometimes they realized they had the wrong person in the position.

Melanie - we have support across campus, you don't make as much money doing tech in a department as you do if you are doing tech work for IT.

Kirsten - we were grateful to find as many as we did. We hope to build on this list and use it effectively for other IT initiatives.

LeCarla - one of our research departments had a major launch, they wanted us to be aware that even though they have an unfettered pipe to NASA, than any change we made to our networks could affect this tool.

Lisa -talk more about the Tier 2 representatives and how you deal with things that your customers want but IT can't do.

LeCarla - it has to be an ebb and flow of information - like "here's why we can't do that," and talk about other options. How else can we solve this?

Cathy - sometimes we find that when you actually talk to them about what they need to do, they are more receptive.

LeCarla - yes, when Windows 7 came out, we talked about why we weren't going to roll it out to the entire campus, they agreed, and said "that makes sense, let us help you."

Melanie - we had a similar conversation on the cost of ports - why it would cost $150. We explained, yes, but when we have to put in a new one, it's $4000 and you still pay only $150.

LeCarla - sometimes you have to agree to disagree.

Google Apps

Carlyn asked: if you are going to Google Apps, are you going because your customers are demanding it or because IT thinks it is a good idea?

Kirsten - it goes beyond just saving money, and also includes cost-avoidance (replacing servers, increasing storage space, etc.) Since we've just gone there, I would be glad to share any information, experience with anyone.

Cathy - we are just moving students

Melanie - we moved students only to email

Kirsten - we moved EVERYTHING - calendar, email, etc. for everyone, faculty included. Anyone who didn't actively make the transition, we've pushed all their new mail to their Google address. Of the 48,000 addresses, we've only had 22,000 logins to date. We anticipate that to go up significantly. Researchers are required to keep their .edu email address for a specified number of years. That is not new, we allowed everyone to keep their email addresses even when we weren't on Google. Even alumni. They may just be using the forwarding feature. Although we are still using the Oracle calendaring system, we are anticipating a campus wide move to the Google calendar. About 25% of users are already using it regularly.

Melanie - one of the things that helped us move students to Google was that they weren't using their UTEP account and were missing important messages sent to their UTEP accounts. When we moved, we made them move their own stuff. They get all the capabilities Livemail (Microsoft) provides. We also allow them to keep a non-UTEP address as a preferred address. We don't promise "forever."

Cathy - our legal office also had problems. When they do their emergency recover, they move their data off-shore (out of the country) and if a student or researcher has work with the government or department of defense, this off-shoring is illegal, so we are setting up accounts on our Exchange service for those individuals.

LeCarla - we've asked our community what they want and of course many of our community members want to go into the cloud, but our legal office also has a problem with that. Particularly for e-Discovery.

Cathy - although we were snarled by the off-shore, the Postini tool in Gmail helps with e-Discovery.

LeCarla - I'm meeting with our legal office in two weeks about NING to see if we can use that for collaboration.

Chat notes

    • Carlyn - Rice:REMEMBER TO MUTE your phone so we don't hear your typing or munching. :-)

    • Mike D - UWF:Can someone say something on the phone line so we can see if we're connected OK?

    • Mike D - UWF:Thanks! Yes, snow day at UWF in Pensacola!

    • Carlyn - Rice:I've been chatting.

    • Jennifer Gray - University of Colorado:More information about CSRs is available at: http://www.colorado.edu/its/tier2/overview.html

    • Cathy - Miami (Ohio):we used individual departmental liaisons when we implemented our campus-wide VoIP and Exchange services. Having an individual in each department was hugely useful in scheduling and providing support

    • Kirsten - Case Wester:We just moved all of our faculty & staff to Google Apps and also identified one person per department to be the representative/liason