Facilitator's Meeting - Session 3

Support Community Workshop, Thursday 11th August 2005

Them and Us: 1 st Facilitator - Tom Muir, IT Manager, Clinical Medicine

We need to thank Douglas for the way he directed this session because I think we all expected ?them and us? to be Computing Service versus the rest of us, but certainly within our group it is not the way it came across.

What we felt would help, particularly between IT Support Staff and Central Services, is to appreciate the other peoples' points of view and their roles. We all have our jobs to do and we all have different things we need to achieve. We've sometimes to learn to appreciate that we can't just expect people to jump through hoops and do things that they are not allowed to do.

Another point is the idea of [human] networking. Once you actually get to know the people that you are dealing with, put faces to the names, names to the faces, then it actually helps you when it comes to working together.

We touched a bit on the role of the Helpdesk. Most of us felt that the Helpdesk would not be so helpful for us. It is more useful to contact some expert directly. This is when the networking comes in. Although there is an important role for the Helpdesk in actually tracking problems to log what has been done.

Faculty IT Committees: Every Faculty should have one. It's important that we all know who's on these committees, how often they meet., what their roles are.

That is where we should get information from, and feed information into what actually happens within our Faculty, and hence further up into the University.

I think this is ?Expectations? versus ?Reality?. We all have expectations of what the [Computing] Service should be like. We are all service users to some extent even if it's just email. Someone pointed out that quite often we get policies and proposals, and they are a bit more rosy than actually happens in reality. Sometimes we just have to temper those expectations with what the reality is.

The big problem we felt was to get the information back from the working parties. How do we disseminate the information to others? One of the points was that we should make use of new technologies, for example RSS. If you don't know something is on the Web how do you know where to look for it in the first place?

Another idea is that we should separate out these policies and documents onto a different domain, or to a different web server. Do searches and be able to find what we are looking for.

Another suggestion was to condense the information into clear bullet points so that it makes sense for us.

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Them and Us: 2 nd Facilitator - John Faithful, IT Manager, Huntarian Museum

It was generally felt in the group that Computing Service was part of ?us? rather than part of ?them?. The areas where there might be issues with CS seem to relate to communication during major policy developments, but generally very positive.

A member of Information Services in the group said that currently they feel that now they have a much better way of providing technical information into policy development than they have had. There seems to have been quite a big change recently there that is actually in dramatically the opposite direction to what certain other people felt about the way the university was going [generally].

But there are lessons there that could be picked up.

It would be useful to have clear ways of complaining about the general infrastructure and service were it was felt that the policy was wrong or the implementation was kind of substandard, and it was not entirely clear how this might happen. Some issues are deemed illegal on university network. How is wireless use throughout the campus implemented? One or two particular issues like that.

Is there an ?Us and Them? within Computing Service itself? Faction within Faction?

Most of the University's IT expertise is actually outside MIS and Computing Service in terms of numbers. There are about 100 within MIS and CS and 150 Distributed Staff. Now if the University is only getting it's input into policy from the Central parts it is missing out on a great deal of expertise who have a lot of direct dealings with end users. I think this is something perhaps which needs to be looked at.

Early awareness of projects and policy development before anything happens rather than half way through or afterwards as often seems to be the case. It's the key to avoid any kind of resentment.

Finally we felt that this framework that has been set up of late providing distributed IT support meetings and seminars is fantastic and is really good way of making contacts and disseminating information. Can we have more please. Especially we felt perhaps focused workshops like some of the legal issues this morning. Rather than having training courses, just having a thing where people can stand up, bring up the kind of problems they experience and get the kind of informed range of feedbacks. This would give us confidence as to what we were doing was right.
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Them and Us: 3 rd Facilitator: Ann Gow, Deputy Director, Hatii, Arts

We talked more about accessibility and about information and communication. There was not a real feeling of ?them and us?.

We felt part of the community and the ?them? were the invisible structure of the committees that hand the policies down from up high.

Accessibility of information on campus systems:

Not all of us knew that all these committees existed.

Perceptions:

Policies on Computing Services webpage are not policies brought by Computing Services but by Committees outwith CS

Communication:

The committee structure, what is it ? How do we get access to it? How can we raise issues? Do we know who our representatives are? Are there people who are our representatives but do not know who we are? There may be somebody on a committee who was a top person in IT 15 years ago and now they are not. We should be able to challenge the structure if we feel it's inappropriate.

[Human]Networking:

It is a great way to put names to faces. There are names I know through web pages etc but it is nice to be able to put a face to the name.

Knowledge:

It's important, and it is power. Information and Communication is very important.