Enterprise 2008: Telling Your IT Story: Little Technology Required (Lisa Trubitt)

Telling Your IT Story: Little Technology Required

Lisa Trubitt, Assistant to the CIO, University of Albany

Enterprise 2008, May 28, 2008

Lisa began by giving an analogy for starting a car to illustrate how you can tell the same story in two different ways – one more complex with a lot of technical detail about the car’s operation, and the other providing only the information the reader needs to know in order to drive. 

• Tell your story so your grandmother can understand.
• Write so that it reads like a chapter in Charlotte’s Web.
• If you consistently tell good stories, your customers are more likely to listen.

Good story elements:

• Are appropriate to the audience
• Holds your attention
• Are easy to understand
• Are fun (whenever possible)

There is always more than one way to tell your story.  Remember:  Making mistakes comes with the territory.  Capture their attention and make them want to listen.

What stories do IT professionals tell?

• Information about our programs and services
• Educate our communities
• Notifications
• Emergencies and/or service interruptions (stories we would rather not have to tell)

Communication challenges:

• Is good communication a priority?  Not as important years ago when IT wasn’t as pervasive as today.  Now, it’s pervasive and people are less willing to accept poor communications.
• Too much information (don’t require scrolling because your customers won’t read it)
• Appropriate level of  technical details.  Don’t use jargon; keep technical info to a minimum; provide a link to more information since people who want technical info will seek it out.

Communication Solutions:

• Be simple and direct.  Shorter stories are often much more difficult to write.
• Appropriate to your audience(s)
• How important is IT to the story: need to know versus nice to know.  How much technology needs to be in the story?  Just because you’re an IT professional doesn’t mean you need to load your story up with technology details.  May need different stories for different audiences.
• Accentuate the positive.  Don’t need to say email will be down because you are replacing an antiquated, out of warranty server.  Tell them what will be better as a result of the outage.
• Audience-based – tell them the benefit they will recognize as a result of the service.  More understanding if they see a meaningful improvement following an inconvenience.
• Positive focus; do not be overly apologetic.
• Use multiple channels for sharing information.  One story often not enough; may need to tell it multiple times or different stories to different audiences.   Share your story in different formats.
• Good communication is everyone’s responsibility.   

Framework:

1. We know there is a problem.
2. We have a solution.
3. Here’s when we will fix it.
4. Here’s what you need to do
5. Here’s where to go for more information

Template Lisa has developed for a communication plan; still under review so changes may be made:

Available Resources

• Colleagues: at home and other institutions
• ITCOMM constituent group (go to EDUCAUSE home page; constituent & discussion groups)
• Your customers

Discussion

About 1/3 of attendees have a full time or nearly full time person in IT org with IT comm. Responsibilities; Lisa’s presentation at EDUCAUSE 2007 had a full house of about 200 and a similar number turned away.  Nearly all who attended had IT comm. Responsibilities.

Take opportunities to make your customers look good.