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.

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.