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.