Developing Unified Communications

Here at the University of Sheffield within Corporate Information & Computing Services a lot of work has been going on with our telephony to start enabling unified communications. An article has been published in this weeks Computer magazine which you can see here, the article is on page 18.

We Have Moved

Delighted to join the Communications Group and to say that the University of the Arts London has successfully completed a move from 65 Davies St to a new location at 272 High Holborn. This was a massive undertaking involving multiple central service departments and parts of the London College of Fashion. All offices are now up and running, services for students began last week including Students’ Union offices opening, Language Centre classes beginning, Student Services and Housing Services opening for business. I look forward to the future of UAL Information Services based at this new location.

The merging of communication & Service Management (ITIL)

Currently within CiCS at the University of Sheffield we are working towards implementing Service Management (ITIL) and work is ongoing in a number of areas. The biggest area of impact in terms of communication is the Service Catalogue.

Our Service Catalogue is still being compiled, however for a while now the top level of categorisation has been agreed. There are 7 main categories in our Service Catalogue, these are;

Learning & Teaching

Research

Communication & Collaboration

Help & Support

Infrastructure

Corporate Information

Business Activity

Ultimately the aim is to reshape our web pages around these categories and consistently use the categories through out our communications.

One area I am currently looking at is our communications around projects, the future aspiration is that we communicate with users on all developments however we manage them (formal project or not) and to communicate our developments under the categorisations of the service catalogue, so it would be easy for anyone to see what we are developing to aid learning & teaching etc.

As a part of this, consideration/thinking is going into what the relationship with the 7 Service Category Managers and the communications team should be and if work within the communications team would be better with individuals allocated to specific service category areas.

Its still early days but for Service Management to work it needs to be embedded in the fundamentals, one of which is communication.

Communication or engagement

As we are in the process of writing a new communication strategy, I was interested to read these thoughts from Andrea Di Maio, a VP at Gartner specialising in e-government, particularly
"In essence, an effective communication strategy is likely to be almost the exact opposite of an effective engagement strategy"

I'd always assumed good communication had to include some engagement, but I can see his point about the difference between communication where you are in control, and 'real' engagement where you have less control. Though whether you should have two separate strategies, I'm not sure. I'd be very interested to read other people's thoughts on this.

Sue

Hello from Angela!

I have successfully created my google account and am now sending my first blog.

I enjoyed meeting you all last week and look forward to contributing to the group.

Communication Strategy

Today marks the start for my team and I working on the new CiCS 3 year communication strategy 2010 - 2013 at the University of Sheffield.

The strategy will cover both internal and external communication and rather than write it in isolation we are holding small discussion groups with staff in the department to gather their views and input.

In order to get representation from across the whole of the department we have worked to a 25% representation rate across all teams. This has resulted in approximately 50 people taking part in the discussions and as we have tried to keep groups small, over the next 2 weeks we will be facilitating 6 group discussions.

Each discussion group will be together for 90 minutes going through some structured areas to consider. In advance all attendees have been asked to consider the following

- What are the problems with communication in CiCS and what actions can you suggest to remedy them?

- Who is responsible for communication and how can we get students, staff & CiCS staff engaged in what we have to say?

- In three years time what might CiCS communication be like, in cultural and technological terms?

The sessions should be interesting, and hopefully provided us with a full range of issues to consider in our new communication strategy. The aim is to publish the strategy early 2010.

Virtual chat

Recently I attend a residential for a distance learning course I’m doing. Day to day the course is supported with a website, online lectures (audio/video as well as slides), resources to download and through a VLE (Moodle).

Everybody there commented how important these face-to-face sessions were, and many said how isolated they had begun to feel, particularly as posts to Moodle had dwindled to nothing in the weeks before the residential. Someone commented they had wondered at one point if anyone else was still doing the course, but that they didn’t feel they could just send an ‘anybody there’ post to Moodle. It made me wonder why, since social chat was the first thing people did when meeting face to face. Interestingly, after the residential there was also a brief flurry of 'chat' posts, before silence one again fell on Moodle.

I'm a very quiet person - always sat at the back of lectures and hoped not to be noticed - but other people on the course are much more outgoing, so I don't think personality explains the difficulties of keeping the site active. It is a fairly small group though, so perhaps there is a 'critical mass' required.

At the Innovation and Communication' event back in 2008, Oxford University showed how they had successfully used Facebook to support central and distributed IT Support Staff. However, they had a very large number of staff (around 600), and about 20% joined the Facebook group, and discussion was still relatively limited.

I wonder what you would regard as successful for this kind of group? Given that they use very few resources to maintain, is any discussion a win, even if it is very sporadic, or should we be putting more effort in to promoting their use?