Strategic Liaison at the University Of Sheffield

Over the last year in CiCS (Corporate Information & Computing Services) at the University of Sheffield we have been working to improve liaison with the rest of the University to improve our services.

The change of the University structure to faculties allowed us to build a more effective model for introducing Strategic Liaison, which started earlier this year.

We spoke with each academic faculty to gain agreement on implementing Strategic Liaison including defining its content to ensure it didn't end up duplicating the role of operational liaison.  

There was flexibility in terms of membership and numbers, with each faculty being asked to decide their own strategic representatives for the faculty.  For CiCS membership has been approximately 5 people predominantly members of the CiCS Executive.  For Faculties the membership has ranged from 5 to 15 representatives.

We decided to implement a structured agenda to provide some consistency across all the strategic liaison meetings, the structure fitted in with the  headings from our service catalogue (Learning & Teaching, Research, Communication & Collaboration, Help & Support, Infrastructure and Corporate Business Activity).

The meetings have been highly successful and we have recently received agreement from the Registrar to implement Strategic Liaison with Professional Services.

Making use of Twitter

Within CiCS at the University of Sheffield we currently maintain a service status web page to let all our users know if any of our IT services are unavailable, at risk or back available following an incident.  We have manually populated this information covering core hours between 8am and 6pm Monday to Friday. 

Over the last few months we have been working on automating the web page to be populated from our helpdesk software, and following successful testing this is set to go live in the next few weeks.

As part of trying to improve the service and provide information on issues with key services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week we started looking at technology to allow easy population of our service status page during out of hours periods without needing a member of staff to have access to the helpdesk software or content management system and hopefully without the need to have access to a computer.

It was felt that a great way to update the information would be something similar to Twitter, accessible via a mobile phone, and so we started to investigate what opportunities were available to us.

We now have created and are testing a system where an incident manager can access a password protected webpage via a mobile phone and populate the fields relating to an incident with our services.  This information is then submitted direct to our helpdesk software and the correct fields are populated and in turn the service status web page is also updated.

Following on from this however was our investigations into Twitter itself, we have now created a Twitter account for CiCS that is automatically populated by our helpdesk software in the same way that our service status webpage is.  Along with this information we have also started to Twitter out our CiCS news which is also currently a web page detailing all the developments and achievements of the department which will impact on our services.

As yet we haven’t promoted CiCS Twitter as we want to test the process out thoroughly first, however we already have a number of University staff who have found the twitter and are following it.

Communicating away from the office

With all the current bad weather it highlights some of the issues around communication that you take for granted when you make it into the office and so do all your staff.

Whilst less than 50% of my team have been able to make it into work today (including myself) it doesn't mean that we aren't working and it definitely doesn't mean we aren't still communicating.

Some months ago we produced a web page which aimed to help all members of staff at the University of Sheffield be able to work effectively off campus which you can view by clicking here. 

One great tool introduced by CICS is myChat which is an authenticated instant messenger tool for all University staff to use.  Using this technology has a number of advantages over other channels available such as email or phones.   Firstly it allows me to see who is actually logged into the system and available,  all my team log into the system when they start work wherever they are and so I don't need to ring round to everyone to find out if they have managed to get to work, if they are coming in etc.  

Secondly its a really quick and easy way of keeping in touch, its not as formal or intrusive as a phone call or email, and responses are a lot quicker.  Files and links can be shared and you can even have a conference chat with all or a number of the team joining in.

This type of technology has its place and with all communication one solution doesn't fit all situations, however on a day like today I am glad to have such a tool at my disposal.