ITCOMM Notes from EDUCAUSE 2008

EDUCAUSE Annual Conference 2008

ITCOMM Constituent Group Meeting Summary

Thursday, October 30, 2008

4:55-6:10 p.m.

Lisa Trubitt began the discussion by welcoming everyone to the first face-to-face meeting of the ITCOMM Constituent Group. She extended regrets from co-chair Mur Muchane, who was unable to attend the annual conference due to a family emergency. The group introduced themselves; there were approximately 35 people in attendance.

Lisa explained that the list was developed to form an online community among IT communications (ITCOMM) professionals. Her vision is to grow the list, as well as develop an online resource that ITCOMM staff can reference for tools, best practices, writing samples and more. She has initiated discussions with Educause about tools currently available to CG lists, new tools they are developing, and will provide updates via the ITCOMM list. Lisa asked for suggestions from attendees about ways to make the list and related resources more valuable to the online community. This elicited the following comments:

It would be useful to have a list of basic things an IT organization needs to communicate
Best practices, especially if you’re a one-person shop
A glossary of terms for non-technical people. It was suggested this might be a good activity for technical and non-technical staff to work on together
Matrices or framework tools for specific types of communication
A better sense of what sorts of tools others used on their campuses
Best practices specifically for campuses that do not have ITCOMM staff about how to share information with their community. Translation tools would help
Information that justifies the importance of IT communications
Information that helps new ITCOMM professionals set priorities

Discussion turned to the role of ITCOMM staff. There was general agreement that the communications landscape consists of multiple parts, including internal communications with your organization and externally with the rest of your campus community. There are also distinctions between drafting ad hoc, emergency messages versus long-term plans about how to communicate with your campus. Several people discussed the importance of knowing your campus culture.

Some attendees were very surprised by the number of people around the table who seemed to be dedicated to communication issues. At least one attendee indicated their campus had a staff of several ITCOMM professionals, while many others had 0-2. In the absence of dedicated ITCOMM staff, communication responsibilities may fall to the CIO, staff with writing talent, or a client support services group. There was general agreement that it is important to establish communication priorities with IT leadership, particularly when there is little or no ITCOMM staff. Attendees agreed that technical staff are not always in touch with the details that will matter to the campus.

The group discussed the importance of partnership with various campus constituencies, including other divisions that may have communication staff of their own. Everyone agreed that ITCOMM professionals need to establish a balance between translating technical talk and making assumptions about what people do/do not know. There was general agreement that there is tremendous need for a common language between the IT organization and the campus community. There was also acknowledgement that the role of the ITCOMM professional is a relatively new one, and the profession is still in the process of developing its own evolution.

The discussion moved towards topics of interest to various attendees, including items that might be raised for comment on the list:

What information is of value to our customers? It’s important to recognize your campus’s many constituencies and how IT impacts them.
How important is it for IT to establish communications as a priority across the organization? Many attendees, particularly those with limited dedicated staff, took the position that good communication should be everyone’s responsibility.
It is extremely important for IT organizations to be able to articulate why their programs and services are so important to the campus community using non-technical language.
It will become increasingly important for IT organizations with little or no ITCOMM professionals to be able to make convincing arguments to fund such positions in the future. There was agreement that the need to communicate successfully has been gaining traction and it is easier than it was a few years ago to justify the importance of these positions.
What do you do to improve communication efforts in your organization if you have few or no resources? Suggestions included the following: contact your PR or Marketing team and see if they can provide any assistance. Consider student interns, preferably from the English department. Check with your student organizations to see whether they have any marketing programs that can assist your organization.
There was a lot of discussion about IT organizational culture and how to change it. In some cultures, IT staff may not be amenable to making communications a priority. In such cases, it’s important to have buy-in from leadership/management. Engaging the campus community may also help.
Campuses that don’t know what their community wants can attempt to engage them in various ways. Developing stakeholder groups is a good way to get regular feedback from various constituencies. Many attendees indicated that hosting a lunch is a good way to get people to come to meetings. It’s important to ask customers a lot of questions and listen to their answers without becoming defensive. While you might hear some things you don’t like, it is one of the best ways to find out how the IT organization is seen by the rest of the campus community.
It is critical that ITCOMM staff readily respond to any questions, comments or complaints from campus constituencies.
Many attendees are interested in on-going discussion on the list about ways to generate feedback from their campus. This includes surveys, face-to-face meetings, developing new stakeholder groups—anything ITCOMM does to get feedback is of interest to readers of the ITCOMM list. It was also noted that other Educause CGs often cover topics that would be of interest to ITCOMM readers.
ITCOMM professionals would also appreciate any information about how to justify hiring ITCOMM staff. If anyone has faced “turf issues” when introducing an ITCOMM person into the organization, how that was addressed is an additional area of interest.

At the conclusion of the meetings, attendees expressed appreciation for the opportunity to meet in-person at the annual Educause conference. There was agreement that many of these issues could be followed up electronically, and Lisa reiterated her intent to keep the group informed about developing more resources for ITCOMM professionals. Someone suggested that during times of scarce resources, web conferences might be a good way to share information for those with reduced travel budgets.

In addition to the meeting discussion, several ITCOMM participants who were unable to come to Orlando sent Lisa questions ahead of time. Here are the areas they indentified for additional discussion on the list:

How are ITCOMM professionals coping with reduced budgets and how to we add value to our institutions in lean times?
What are favorite or recommended training resources for ITCOMM professionals?
How are you planning to deal with the communication requirements for the HEOA?
If your ITCOMM team is more than one person, how did you successfully campaign for more staff?
What is your greatest communication challenge and how are you trying to solve it?
IT services catalog—who has them, who’s developing them?
Communicating with students versus faculty/staff—what works best?
How do you communicate with a campus with varying levels of technical expertise?
What, if anything, is your campus doing to address the fact that students often know so much more about IT than faculty/staff?
Use of wikis, blogs and RSS feeds—how are they working on campuses that use them?
Online training
What good web resources have you used?
Communication on the web
Online services for course evaluations