Customer liaison - the need for partnership

In many Universities, certain academic departments employ their own local IT staff in addition to the central IT service. A perennial issue the need for good engagement between local IT staff and central IT staff.

I have found that department-based computing staff are increasingly keen to enable their user community to leverage centrally-provided services, since this reduces duplication and frees local IT staff time to focus on discipline-specific needs. Why run a your own server if you can use someone else's?

For everyone to be comfortable with changing from a locally-provided service (perhaps tailored to local requirements), to a central service (which may be less specialised), there has to be a clear understanding of the local needs, and of the nature of the service which is being provided centrally. For instance, what levels of reliability and performance are really required? What levels are being aspired to and achieved centrally?

But beyond this, there's a need for good engagement at a personal level between local and central support staff. A level of mutual trust needs to be built up, so that local IT staff can be confident that particular local requirements will be looked at sympathetically, while central service staff need to know that departments will be reasonable in their expectations. Having this level of trust makes it much easier for all the stakeholders to engage in guiding the ongoing development of the service. In other words, what's needed is partnership.

I think the Managed Desktop service at the University of Edinburgh is a good example of partnership. There is considerable bilateral communication between central and local staff through a range of mechanisims, including workshops and informal lunch meetings as well as mailing lists, a wiki, and of course individual email and telephone contact. Everyone has a say in shaping the service as it continues to evolve. The result is a good level of mutual understanding and trust among stakeholders, without which the Managed Desktop would not have been nearly so successful.

There are many things which can get in the way of good partnership. Sometimes things become too adversarial, or the tone of communication is inappropriate, or (more simply) pressure of work means that personal interaction drops down the priority list.

The challenge for liaison staff is to foster an improved sense of partnership between local and central services.