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A man and his son are in a car crash. The man is killed and the son is taken to hospital gravely injured. When he gets there, the surgeon says “I can’t operate on this boy- he is my son!” How is this possible?

(Answer somewhere below. I’m not telling you where)

I’ve talked to lots of colleagues lately about using blogs for campus communication and community building.

The reception to my idea has been tepid.

It took me awhile to understand why, but I think I finally get it.

Exhibit A:

(From an actual conversation - names changed to protect the guilty)

Sally (to a co-worker): “Joe, you blog, don’t you?”

Joe: “Hah, I used to five years ago when it was the cool thing to do.”

Exhibit B:

(A totally hypothetical situation)

A campus administrator bans all blogging by his employees because he fears a loose cannon will expose campus fraud, corruption and mediocrity.

What’s going on?

Joe perceives blogging as an online personal journal filled with schlock.

The campus administrator perceives blogging as the tool of 21^st century muckraking journalists.

You may have perceived the surgeon in the story above as a man, and thus failed to recognize that the surgeon was the boy’s mother (note: there are other possible explanations, so keep thinking).

Yes, surgeons are most often men, but they don’t have to be. Blogs have most often been used as personal online journals and platforms for Woodward and Bernstein wannabes. But they don’t have to be.

There are many challenges in IT these days: funding, security, identity management, content management, personnel management, data ownership, web portals, web 2.0, digital media production, training, support, just trying to keep up with the ridiculous speed of change.

Are we stuck in the ways we perceive these challenges? How might a little lateral thinking help us?

Pick a challenge and talk among yourselves. Feel free to use this blog’s nifty commenting feature to share your creative lateral ideas and let’s work together to find solutions.

Tags: People, Strategy by Gordy Pace
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As we welcome our first group of students and parents to orientation today, a conversation is taking place in the Educause portal forum about providing parent access to student data through campus portals.

Gettysburg College, Iowa State, the University of Arizona and the Pennsylvania College of Technology all shared how they allow parents to access academic and financial records-FERPA-protected information-specific to their son or daughter.

These campuses handle parent (or guest) account creation in different ways. Some allow the parent to request an account and connect that account to a registered student. Others require the student to create and manage their own guest accounts.

While account creation mechanisms differ, all of these campuses deal with FERPA -protected information the same way. The student has control through a web interface to choose what data the parent account can access.

Gettysburg College built its web portal 10 years ago and has been a thought leader in portal develoment. You can visit their parent portal information page at http://public.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav/parents.htm.

Tags: Communication, Innovation, People, Policies, Strategy, Systems, Web by Gordy Pace
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I recently read an article detailing the savings of right turns. UPS estimates saving three million gallons of fuel last year by providing their drivers with right-turn routes.

The article got me thinking. At first I remembered a news article from my youth in NW Ohio about a man stopped by our local sheriff deputy who claimed to be driving around the United States by only making right turns on orders from the Lord. While this does not seem like a way to save gas, it was also 30+ years ago when the price of gasoline was not an obstacle to seeing the USA in the auto of your choosing.

Upon returning to present-day Missoula after a detour to my childhood, my thoughts turned to ways of examining everyday practices to make a difference. I believe by taking small steps to chance our routine we can make major changes. I first started this process by turning of my computer at the end of the workday. Then I began turning off my office light while attending meetings, and taking the bus to work several days a week. Small changes to my routine which over the course of a year will add up to real savings in electricity and fuel.

Kermit the Frog argues it is not easy being green, but I would have to disagree. As we celebrate Earth Day let us think of the ‘right turns’ we can take to make a better world for all.

Tags: Administrative, Innovation, Leadership and Management, People, Strategy by Randy Gottfried
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Robert Kennedy famously said, “There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why… I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?”

I’ve been doing a little of both lately as I’ve been talking to people around campus about how we should be using technology to communicate effectively. I look at our current state of campus electronic communication — primarily email spam and less-than-stellar websites — and I ask why. And I dream of things that could be — sophisticated targeted messaging, flawless search results, subscription-based and community-generated content, control given to the people we serve — and I ask why not.

Technological change is relentless. It won’t be slowing down anytime soon. We will adapt and thrive when we let ourselves dream of things that never were and ask why not.

Tags: Communication, Innovation, Leadership and Management, Policies, Strategy, Web by Gordy Pace
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Wikipedia defines spamming as “the abuse of electronic messaging to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages.” The practice, the entry notes, “is widely reviled.”

Other definitions of spam use the words unwelcome, inappropriate and junk.

I recently wrote about the daily barrage of spam hitting campus from the outside. But what about spam from within? Can email from a campus colleague be perceived as indiscriminate, unsolicited, unwelcome, inappropriate, reviled junk?

I presume your answer is yes.

Which begs two questions: 1) Why would a campus department engage in a practice that invites scorn? And, 2) if not bulk electronic messaging, how does a campus department effectively and inexpensively communicate its offerings and events?

Why do we do it?

One reason we spam each other is obvious:  sending thousands of identical electronic messages is easy, and it doesn’t cost the sender a dime. Other reasons: The sender sincerely believes that every single recipient wants and needs to hear his or her message. The productivity output looks great (”I got our message out to 15,000 people in 5 minutes!” you tell your boss). And, I suspect, most of us simply a lack the time, skill and motivation to identify an appropriate target audience, consider their needs, produce quality messages and imagine creative delivery channels.

The tragedy of spam

Spamming may be free to the sender, but the cost is steep for the University. It goes far beyond the real monetary costs of bandwidth usage and data storage. I’m talking about the abuse of people’s time, attention and trust, and the lost opportunities for future constructive communication.

When messages we receive from “the University” are consistently impersonal, irrelevant and overwhelming in numbers, we stop paying attention. All future communication is compromised. Regaining the trust and attention of our audience grows increasingly difficult.

Internal spam is a classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario. The individual department benefits in the short run by using a community resource to successfully reach 1 out of 1,000 customers, while the University suffers the long-term consequences of 999 disenchanted (and increasingly disengaged) customers out of every 1,000.

 New rules

An anti-spam policy might curb negative behavior, but such a policy would not address the bigger issue:  how do we communicate effectively with our stakeholders? We need a new awareness and appreciation for what it means to communicate effectively in the Web 2.0 world. And we need to adopt more sophisticated strategies and technical solutions.

Here are six rules that would move us in the right direction:

1. Provide a remarkable product or service. You will cultivate a passionate audience who will do much of your communication work for you. Mundane and mediocre doesn’t compete well for attention and doesn’t travel far in social and professional networks.
2. Communicate well. I mean really well. Only communicate the very most important things. Stay focused. Keep it simple. Tell compelling stories. Make people laugh or cry and they will pay attention and remember.
3. Invest money. Recognize that communication is the most important thing you do. Hire talented writers, designers, speakers and communication strategists. Be willing to pay for ad placements, quality website design, media development and professional publications. Don’t hire your nephew at minimum wage to design your website. You will get what you pay for.
4. Make your information easy to find. Make your online content is available through RSS subscription. Optimize your online search results. Participate in online social and professional networks.
5. Communicate at appropriate times and in relevant context. Amazon does this well (you just bought book “A” and they immediately (timing) let you know that you might also be interested in book “B” (relevant)). Learn to recognize when someone has taken an action that invites related communication.
6. Seek permission to communicate with people, and never abuse the privilege they have given you to interrupt them with your message. Even opt-in mailing lists can become spam if you get greedy. Provide opportunities for your audience to tell you whether your communication is effective. And listen to them.

Tags: Communication, Leadership and Management, People, Policies, Strategy by Gordy Pace
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Wikis have arrived on campus. Academic classes are using them to collaborate. Committees are using them to communicate. Tech teams are using them to document.

CIO magazine touts the use of wikis for project and process management, and offers some advice on building and managing your own wiki in an article titled How to Build Your Own Wikipedia.

Do you teach a class, manage a project or chair a committee that could benefit from a wiki?

Tags: Innovation, Strategy, Support, Web by Gordy Pace
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Stamats is offering an online seminar on April 24th from 12:30-2 p.m. entitled Web 2.0: What it means, how it works, and how to use it to your advatage. The cost of the webinar is $259, but an unlimited number of people can participate.

If you are intersted in participating and perhaps sharing in the cost, please let me know. If there is enough interest, we will register for the webinar and arrange a central location for UM participants.

Here’s a description of the event from Stamats:

Web 2.0 is significantly altering the higher education marketing landscape. As a social and cultural phenomenon, it’s transforming nearly every aspect of digital communication, from Web site design and content creation to search. This session will clarify the phenomenon and its ramifications, and explore the 2.0 tools, strategies, and tactics colleges and universities should add to their marketing, recruiting, and advancement arsenals.

• The similarities and differences among the key social media platforms and technologies
• The rules for engagement that underlie any effective 2.0 strategy
• How to build your own 2.0 community and be part of existing communities
• How to integrate 2.0 prinicpals and tactics into traditional marketing

Also, if you would like a basic introduction to Web 2.0 and its impact on The University of Montana, Nick Shontz from the IT web group and I have developed a 20-minute presentation that we would be happy to deliver to any department or group.

Tags: Innovation, Strategy, Training, Web by Gordy Pace
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I just read on line and in the Missoula Independent, that in Japan, 5 of the top 10 best selling books are not your typically written novels. They are written on cell phones as text messages. One woman in particular, wrote her novel while commuting on the train. The most telling comment was her assertion that most young people don’t read books by professional writers because the sentences are too difficult to read! She wrote a 140 page novel. I find that incredibly astonishing.

I can’t imagine reading a single page, let alone 140 pages of text messages with the currency used to create text messages. But I’m old school. I still read novels with real words composed in gramatically correct sentences.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, the trends we deal with everyday for one. Students come to us every year with a new set of technological skills and new gadgets with which to use them. As many of you already know, email is “Old School”. Voice mail? What’s that? They understand VOIP and Instant Messaging. They are so connected to their devices that when they send you an email (duh, old school!) and you don’t respond within minutes, they try again and then wonder why you are ignoring them.

The world of conversation has taken a huge new leap forward into technology. People are connected to their peers and friends via their devices as if they are in the same room and the conversation continues in one long stream. If you’re not part of the conversation, then you are missing out, and sometimes missing out in a big way. For my part, not being part of the Instant Messaging has left me out of the loop on more than one occasion. I had a student worker who would I-M my boss about his schedule, and not respond to my emails. So when he didn’t show up for a shift, I was at a loss.

Jed Liston, VP of Enrollment Services,  gave an overview last year of the new student populations coming to school and I am reminded of what he said. Our way of communicating and even our way of thinking in terms of getting the most out of our students has to evolve.  Students are now so in touch with their social networks that they collaborate with each other on projects in ways we could not have imagined. They call and text their parents several times a day. Their parents (sometimes called “Helicopter Parents”) are so intertwined with them that almost no decision is made independently. And students these days embrace that closeness. I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and on my own to make my own decisions.

But what does this mean to us? If we are to succeed in the workplace with students and then with graduates in their first jobs, we have to take that into consideration. We have to realize and use this information.  Being part of a team is perhaps as important, or more so, than having initiative and being a self starter. And, according to Jed’s research so far, their collaboration actually leads to much more enthusiastic and successful results than can be imagined.

Personally, I don’t think I can read a text message novel just yet. After all, I don’t even know how to text on my cell phone!

Tags: Communication, People, Strategy by Jace Laakso
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Alphabetical order is necessary sometimes. More and more it isn’t.

If you’re thumbing through a printed encyclopedia, you appreciate alphabetical order. If you’re on Wikipedia, alphabetical order doesn’t matter so much. You just type a word or phrase into a search box.

Same goes for a printed telephone book versus an online directory.

Most of the real estate on the top two tiers of UM’s massive web site is cluttered with alphabetically ordered navigation links. It’s that way for three primary reasons:

1. We have chosen through a political process to have so many links on our homepage and landing pages that alphabetical order is the only hope a Google-challenged visitor has of finding the link they’re looking for;
2. Alphabetical order relieves us of the politically-charged burden of making value judgments about which links are more important and which links are less important (or altogether unnecessary) to our audience; and
3. Producing consistently compelling content requires talent and resources. Alphabetical links are cheap and easy. We get what we pay for.

Cluttering our precious web space with alphabetized navigation links breaks my heart. We should be using that space to tell authentic stories, stir emotions, share values, provide service, converse and connect with our community and those we want to be part of our community in the future.

Alphabetically ordered navigation links communicate nothing about who we are. They only tell our web visitors that we have chosen to shift the burden of making sense of our complex organization to them.

I guess alphabetical order does tell a story.

Tags: Communication, Leadership and Management, People, Policies, Strategy, Web by Gordy Pace
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The recent shooting deaths of seven students at Northern Illinois University brings up  unsettling thoughts about that happening here. At IT Central, we are the “Help Desk”. Being part of a Help Desk, means that by the time we are contacted, many  times the caller or walk-in client is at the very end of his rope. He is extremely frustrated that his password doesn’t work, or that he can’t log into the wireless network and he blames the IT department for his difficulty. Being the Help Desk, we get: “You changed my password! Why does my password have to change?!! Why did you do this to me?!” Sometimes it gets pretty heated. Given the broad cross section of people we deal with, it is entirely conceivable that someone at some time could be pushed over the edge.

How do we deal with such possibilities? It is inconceivable that we would be ready for anything. How can we, as an organization, possibly be prepared or even think about the unknown?

The bigger question would be what can we as an organization do to prevent situations that would push someone over the edge? How can we change the processes that cause unexpecting users thinking that we have put obstacles in front of their learning or teaching experience?  This can be difficult and certainly requires thinking and planning given the complexities of not only technology, but also interdepartmental policies and procedures.

So far, the best efforts are in the nature of what do we do in case of violence rather than in the prevention of it, i.e. alerting people via e-mail, voice mail and text message that there is a crisis. Let’s think ahead, so we aren’t simply mopping up the aftermath. It would require perhaps a suspension of disbelief and most importantly, time to come up with viable  solutions. As the oft quoted ad jingle says: “We can do it.”

Tags: Communication, Security, Strategy by Jace Laakso
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