Towards Less Seamful Services
At this week’s UCCSC conference, I spoke about a report that I’d helped write, on providing “less seamful services,” and better collaboration between distributed and centralized IT units. I spend a lot of time thinking about that issue, because LSCR is positioned right in the middle of it; to IST, LSCR looks like a department, but to our departments, LSCR tends to look like centralized IT.
(Aside: I would prefer that our customers view us as peers and partners. We do make an effort to behave that way: for example, we locate our folks in departmental space rather than moving off-campus to an office where we could all sit together. We’d rather be closer to the users. But looking at the survey and interview results so far, it seems we have a ways to go to really be seen as integral by most of our customers.)
The report was done as part of ITLP, which is a leadership program for IT folks in higher ed. The program included folks from Berkeley, UDub, Minnesota, and Penn State, and the report we did surveyed people in distributed and centralized IT at all four of those universities. Because they’re all large public research institutions, the issues tend to be pretty similar.
My presentation (.ppt) focused on the communication and collaboration challenges. We have a ton of meetings, but we spend too much time presenting to each other and not enough time talking to each other. Our communications tend to be along accepted and formalized lines, and we often gloss over or ignore the underlying issues which keep us from moving forward. And yes, there is an irony that I was making this point via a PowerPoint presentation; however, the most important part of my presentation was a break-out session where I got the folks from each campus to talk to each other about the pressures or barriers they are facing in their local organization. I think it went well; the room got noisy enough that it was hard to hear, which I took as a good sign.
The report (.doc) addresses the above issue of communication and collaboration, and also has a number of recommendations to make the user experience better in specific technical areas (desktop support, email, and information systems).
