Developing a Culture of Communication

Hi James We continually foster and nurture a collaborative environment here at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (30,000 students & about 3,500 faculty and staff) for the delivery of IT services, and that includes IT communications. We have centralized IT staff who provide the infrastructure and enterprise services, and local IT professionals who support their individual units, schools/colleges faculty/staff, as well as deliver specilized services. We developed what we call a tech-users group comprised of central and local IT professional staff. This group shares information with the result of local IT professionals often communicating directly with their faculty/staff and/or passing along messages from central IT. I work very closely with our First Year Center and together we have developed an effective model to deliver IT communications to incoming students. I've also cultivated relationships with our Graduate School and our Housing staff. Together, we share how and when to deliver information about IT services to our incoming students. As we roll out a new wireless service on campus (building by building), we're working very closely with the building managers as well as our central facilities/physical plant staff. On occasion, we will request, building managers pass along messages from central IT to building occupants. I've found that these relationships take awhile to develop. It's important that these non-central IT partners see value in what they are commmunicating and understand the impact of good commuinications. Feel free to contact me directly if you'd like to chat. Wendy Wendy Luljak Senior IT Communications Strategist University Information Technology Services University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee E-mail: wluljak@uwm.edu Phone: 414-229-3795 Sabin 388