Communication technologies today are amazing. Yet, I hear more rumbling about The University of Montana’s inability to communicate effectively with students, employees and other constituents than ever before.  Nobody is happy.

I don’t know if people are any happier at North Carolina State University, but NC State offers a nice contrast to UM when it comes to campus communication strategies. UM has (sort of) adopted a tool called “Official Notices” for official campus communication. Official Notices can be read in OneStop and/or delivered to email addresses. NC State has adopted Twitter as an official channel of communication. They built a page that aggregates “official” Tweets from multiple departments.

The medium is not the message. Twitter doesn’t guarantee better communication than UM’s Official Notices. But NC State has adopted a strategy very different from UM. Without judging the quality or effectiveness of the communication, here is a numbers comparison between UM and NC State on official communication.

Number of messages in my UM Official Notices inbox:

8 over the last 26 days

Number of Tweets on the NC State Twitter page:

39 in the last 21 hours

Number of departments with ability to send UM Official Notices:

9

Number of departments at NC State with Twitter accounts:

62

Percentage of UM messages that link to a web page for more information:

37%

Percentage of NC State Tweets that link to a web page for more information:

67%

Average number of characters in UM Official Notices:

1,782

Average number of characters in NC State Tweets

108

Comments?

If you’re a student, sign up today.

If you have a reliable channel of communication to students, we would appreciate your help in getting the message to them to make the switch early.

Voluntary account sign-up will continue for several more weeks. All students who have not signed up for UMConnect accounts by the end of fall semester will have accounts created for them in early January.

What are the benefits?

UMConnect is powered by Microsoft’s Live@edu, which provides email, file storage and a collection of collaboration and networking tools. The email interface is similar to the Outlook Web Access used by GrizMail. The big difference is that students get 10 gigabytes of email storage instead of the 35 megabytes provided by GrizMail.

Live@edu also provides 25 gigabytes of file storage. Files can be saved for public or private use. Office Live provides additional storage space for Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents.

Have questions? Go to our UMConnect FAQ page, or email us at italk@umontana.edu.

UMConnect provides access to Microsoft’s Live@edu, a suite of web-based services including Outlook live email, Skydrive virtual document storage, Office Live for storing and collaborating on MS Office documents, and other collaboration and networking tools.

UM students will have the opportunity throughout fall semester to sign up for UMConnect accounts. In early January, UMConnect accounts will be created for all remaining students.

Check out Ask Monte for UMConnect FAQs.

Think about the novels, movies and TV dramas you love. Information is artfully left out. The omissions create gaps that you feel compelled to fill. Your brain engages. Your emotions intensify. You’re hooked.

You willingly invest 30 minutes. An hour. Two hours. Twenty hours to reach a resolution. To see if you were right.

Good stories create gaps and build suspense. What have these stories left out?

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Look at your website content and design. What can you take away to make it better?

The guidelines acknowledge the challenge of writing policy for an ever-expanding and changing set of non-University web systems. In response, the guidelines focus on constraints imposed by FERPA and other privacy laws and policies related to a student’s educational record; HIPAA and Montana health information privacy laws; federal and state archival and retrieval requirements for official electronic communication; and state laws regarding personnel evaluations.

The draft guidelines are available on the web at:
www.umt.edu/it/policies/externalwebsystems.aspx.

Having trouble viewing the video? View at TED.com.

The English department, in collaboration with UM legal counsel and Information Technology, drafted a Facebook best practices document to help guide other UM departments. The guide was developed prior to Facebook’s recent upgrade, so it already needs modification. Your thoughts are welcome.

We’ll send one printed version of Bits to each department. Those should arrive today or tomorrow. But most of the distribution will be done by linking you to a PDF version.

If you have story ideas for future issues of the newsletter, please let us know.

“One of the pilots does something wrong that by itself is not a problem. Then one of them makes another error on top of that, which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe. But then they make a third error on top of that, and then another and another and another, and it is the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster.”

The interesting thing is, the errors are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill, Gladwell says. They are invariably errors of teamwork and communication.

“One pilot knows something important and somehow doesn’t tell the other pilot. One pilot does something wrong, and the other pilot doesn’t catch the error. A tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps–and somehow the pilots fail to coordinate and miss one of them.”

If technology disasters caused loss of human life, they would prompt in-depth investigations and analyses, and I suspect we’d come to the same conclusion. Teamwork and communication failures are the main reason minor issues escalate into major problems.

Teamwork and communication can break down for any number of reasons:  too much to do, too little time, lack of awareness, personality conflicts and organizational culture all contribute to the problem. None of these issues are easy to solve. But simply being aware that teamwork and communication are essential to success is a good start.

Listen to air traffic communication from Chicago