I have been invited to keynote the ACUTA Conference in Chicago on March 21, 2017. I will be discussing the changes in the use of technologies that impact our campuses and the associated infrastructure.
Author: Cole Camplese
Being a Customer Service Company
I drive. A lot. I commute in the wonderful Chicago traffic five days a week, twice a day, covering about 45 total miles. Depending on the time of day I can make it in to work in 40 minutes if I am lucky, but it is closer to an hour going home if I leave at a respectable time. That has proven to be the single biggest change for me personally in making the move to UChicago. What it really means is that I have to fill up that time with some degree of productive activity.
On many days I schedule phone calls that let me extend the day while in the car, but other times I listen to podcasts.I have a ton of subscriptions that I listen to using Overcast on my iPhone. Quite a few are by Gimlet Media. They exploded onto the scene with a very unique show called, “Startup” that originally chronicled the creation of the company itself. Since then they’ve released a ton of exceptional shows that get me through the week.
But, there is one podcast that I love to listen to as soon as a new episode is available, “How I Built This” from NPR. It is a radio-style show where it is a well produced interview with founders of companies about how they built their companies. There are excellent ones about Airbnb, Instagram, Samuel Adams, and more. But the best one I have listened to was this morning with the founder of Zappos, Tony Hsieh. I am not going to describe it as it is an absolute must listen, so please do that … I stopped short of sending out a mandate to listen as it is that good.
It resonated with me for so many reasons, but the thing I took from it that I want us to own is when Tony says something to the effect of, “Zappos isn’t a shoe company, it is a customer service company. We want to be known as not selling shoes, but selling great customer service.” Right there it is for what we’ve been talking about — us all owning great customer service. Yes, we are an operations organization, but we are also a customer service organization. I think if you put those two things next to each on a balanced score card, I believe being a customer service company comes first.
Customer Service Mentality
Just prior to the end of the year, I wrote an email to share some thoughts with you regarding customer service and its primary role in our work. I want to follow up with more on that message and also to provide information on an executive director search and additional changes and next steps.
I began the note sent at the end of November with the following:
Service to and for our customers—whether faculty, students, staff, alumni, or any guest of the University or member of the broader community—is paramount. It is, in my estimation, the single most important focus underlying all of our work.
It has been encouraging to receive replies and feedback indicating this message resonates with many of you. Emphasizing customer service and reinforcing a “customer first” organizational mindset isn’t something that is good simply to say, I believe it is the right thing to do and also something we must do.
We must make it easier, not harder, for our customers to connect with technology; leverage technology to advance their work and their research and academic pursuits; and feel especially positive — delighted — about their experiences using technology and in working with those of us in IT who support that technology.
To move us toward achieving this goal, a customer service review was conducted at the beginning of December. A small team of higher education colleagues came to campus to assess IT Services’ customer service organization and overall approach to customer service. The team provided recommendations regarding the ways in which we can better support and serve our customers.
Some of us have started to work through the recommendations from the customer service review. In the coming weeks we will begin discussing the recommendations more fully with the ITS Senior Leadership Group (SLG) and the staff in our Solutions and Service Management (SSM) organization, as well as with others throughout ITS.
To summarize just a couple of the recommendations broadly applicable across ITS:
- All areas of ITS and all ITS staff need to own “great customer service,” not only the SSM organization.
- Service owners throughout ITS need to have documented service level agreements and must strive to always meet those agreements.
One highlight of the customer service review focused on the TechBar, which was viewed as a center of excellent customer service within ITS. Because there is a natural connection between the work of TechBar and the SSM organization — and to better leverage the best aspects of TechBar throughout the SSM organization — TechBar will be moved out of Academic and Scholarly Technology Services and returned to SSM. While this realignment won’t immediately change the operations of the TechBar, it will provide more opportunities for future expansion and diffusion of the TechBar model.
Within the next two weeks, a national search will begin for a new executive director for Solutions and Service Management. This executive director will report to me and directly oversee the customer service organization within ITS, as well as lead efforts to transform the overall customer service approach across ITS.
Until the new executive director for SSM is hired, we will continue to work with our existing team to provide leadership for SSM. Staff are being asked to identify and, where appropriate, execute on any opportunities to immediately begin to improve our customer service approach.
A few other customer service-focused efforts currently in flight include:
- A series of Lynda.com courses on customer service are being reviewed and will be added to playlists made available to all ITS staff. Once available, I will ask you to complete those courses as part of our collective professional development and consider how you can incorporate the lessons into your work.
- By the end of January, a plan will be drafted to establish a roadmap that will evolve the service desk, housed within SSM, to be able to provide tier one support for the services offered by ITS.
- In February, Apple has invited me to bring a small group of UChicago staff members to attend a special training opportunity at their Michigan Avenue store. There, representatives from Apple will walk us through their approach to customer service and discuss ways we can improve our approach.
As I reiterated in my November note and as I’ve said many times before, our aim is and should always be to delight our customers. We have a good start, a great team, and the beginnings of a plan to be even better.
Please do not to hesitate to reach out to me with any questions or feedback. As always, I appreciate your engagement on these important topics.
How I use my iPad
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I was asked by a colleague how I use my iPad effectively and what the apps are that I use to get work done. I sent him an email, but thought I would expand on it here. Also, I must admit, that lately I have been going back and forth quite a bit between my iPad Pro and my MacBook Pro … it always seems to be that way when Apple releases a new version of MacOS.
At any rate, here are my top apps, outside of mail and calendar (which by the way are Apple Mail and Timepage):
I use Evernote to keep all of my notes organized. I don’t type many notes, but I do draft a ton of emails and memos in Evernote. When I take notes in meetings I do it by hand with …
Penultimate … this is the note taking app I use with the Apple Pencil. It connects to Evernote automatically so any and all notes I take in this app also show up in Evernote. It allows for searching, even within hand written notes. If I get paper handed to me in meetings that I want to keep I use …
Scannable … this lets me take a quick picture of the pages and it converts them into searchable attachments that also show up in Evernote.
Office365 apps … Word in particular is a constant. The whole Office suite on an iPad is really quite amazing. I pay for O365 out of pocket at the moment, but will obviously switch to the UChicago instance when we go live.
1Password is the way I manage my passwords on all my machines. On iOS, without an integrated password management tool I would be completely out of luck.
Google Docs is also a must for me as several of my colleagues use Docs as the way we write and share.
Box is also a heavily used app for me, but you could easily replace that with iCloud Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, etc depending on what cloud based storage option one might be using the most.
WordPress … I maintain a few blogs and find writing in the native WordPress app on iOS to be a pleasure. As a matter of fact this was written on my iPad.
Concur … doing approvals for travel and expense reports is so much easier on iOS than on my laptop, so I typically do all that from my iPad.
I’ll lump Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Flickr together … I maintain contact across the social web on most of these platforms with varying degrees of engagement, but ultimately I find all of them easier and faster on the iPad than on my laptop.
Finally, for reading I keep Feedly, Medium, and Apple News in play most of the time. I do RSS with Feedly, but lately have been spending a ton of time in Medium.
With all that said, the introduction of the Apple Pencil has really changed the way I use my iPad — I never used to take digital handwritten notes, but now that I have the Pencil it is my preferred method. That has allowed me to leave my old school, paper-based notebook at my desk.
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Toward UChicago IT
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About 12 months ago (on 9/28/2015), I sat down with the IT Leaders from across campus for the first time ever to talk about the environment we all work in. It was an interesting first meeting in that when we talked about the kinds of things they would like to see IT Services do better and things we should tackle together. I wrote down what everyone in the room said and have looked at that list over and over again during my first year to drive my thinking as we keep making progress as a campus. What struck me was the consistency with which the IT Leaders listed the things they thought we could all do together and do better — campus-wide ticketing, campus-wide email, classroom standards, and so on … a picture of my notes from that day are below.
Interestingly enough, one year later most of that list is what we are thinking about as areas of focus in the IT Rationalization program we kicked off at the start of August. The items that aren’t part of IT Rationalization are mainly enabling processes (SLAs) that are being addressed in our current work at redeveloping ServiceNow. It makes me really excited to think we are pointing in the right direction as an IT community.
That leads me to introduce an important initiative that I have been talking about for almost as long as I have been here, IT@UChicago. A simple observation I made upon arrival is that we do not have a structural way to make large decisions together as an IT community. At the end of the day ITS is a service provider, we should be more engaged with the larger IT community to better understand the needs of those we provide services to and for. Crafting a vision for how we come together and do that is at the heart of IT@UChicago. The initiative will be built on four core programs …
Each of the four build on and support the others. We have kicked off the IT Rationalization, starting with data collection with ITS already. We will be asking all of our campus IT counterparts to do the same thing starting this week. The IT Leadership Council will be formed over the next few months and will bring together the senior most IT leaders from across the campus to form an ongoing shared decision making group. The IT Academy will be formed out of the ITLC to help level the knowledge about core IT for our larger community. IT Events will be planned together to share knowledge, grow community, and highlight the work we are doing collectively and individually.
We have built a new website that I invite you to look at and react to. I felt creating a site that laid out this vision would help not only make people aware of what we are doing, but to also help hold us accountable for doing what we’ve been talking about over the last 12 months. The community was clear with me during my first year, they want to be a part of the future of IT at UChicago and I feel building this initiative this way will allow us to achieve that vision.
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Why are you here and not somewhere else?
A really thoughtful reflection by one of my ITS colleagues. I have always believed that when multiple members of the organization write, it raises the collective intelligence of the whole group. We are a team made up of people who have such a diversity of thoughts, experiences, and insights. When we share our work as a group it amplifies the messages we are trying to communicate to the campus.
Maybe many of us just feel like a cog in the wheel, feeling siloed, and disconnected from any larger purpose – well, yeah, that is kind of depressing. And it begs the question, why are you here and not somewhere else?
Source: Why are you here and not somewhere else? | A Collection of Notes and Thoughts
Cubs Day
Earlier this week I was lucky enough to attend a Cubs home game against the Brewers. What made it extra special was that it was an outing with a bunch of people from the UChicago ITS team. A colleague of mine had purchased a block of nose bleed seats that were to be used as part of a CIC meeting. Too bad for him that the original game got rained out so we were “stuck” with a group of tickets. We decided we would raffle them off to people in ITS.
What I was struck by, other than the beauty of Wrigley and the Cubs outstanding play, was just how much fun we all had. It was nice getting to sit together as a group and laugh and talk for a few hours. In a lot of ways it was like an extended Coffee with Cole. I got to know some of our staff better than I would have otherwise and made some really meaningful connections. I honestly think those who could make it were extremely appreciative. It has me thinking that we should do this as an entire group next year if we can pull it off.
2016 Excellence Awards
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Last week we celebrated our annual UChicago ITS Excellence Award winners with a small reception in Harper Court. With Lake Michigan as our backdrop, we took time out from all the work we have to recognize the individuals who, nominated by peers, continually show a willingness to go above and beyond.
It was a great event, punctuated by impromptu selfies, some great tweets, and lots of smiles. I have written about the process we used to arrive at our winners and wanted to follow that up with some additional thoughts. After the committee had met and selected the winners from the nominations I asked our team if we could produce a small video that tried to capture the spirit of that selection meeting. We asked members of the committee to reflect on the process and to try and express how fantastic it was to hear our colleagues praise and talk so positively about their peers. The video above was put together by some talented members of the team in less than 12 hours and was showed at the award ceremony.
We do things like the Excellence Awards because we genuinely want to work together in support of our great University. My only regret from the day was that more of our team couldn’t be there. I think everyone enjoyed the time and truly appreciated recognizing each other. We had a great time!
[/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Code”]<center><blockquote class=”twitter-tweet” data-lang=”en”><p lang=”en” dir=”ltr”>People in C-suite jobs aren’t all bad. <a href=”https://twitter.com/colecamplese”>@colecamplese</a> you’re ok in my book! U + <a href=”https://twitter.com/UChicagoITS”>@UChicagoITS</a> = ? <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/pals?src=hash”>#pals</a> <a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/bffgoals?src=hash”>#bffgoals</a> <a href=”https://t.co/LWLfBHoZXO”>pic.twitter.com/LWLfBHoZXO</a></p>— Eric Frazier (@ettufrazier) <a href=”https://twitter.com/ettufrazier/status/760224174564601857″>August 1, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src=”//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js” charset=”utf-8″></script></center>[/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”Row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Twitter Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]
Selfies, Tweets, and Retweets
One of the things I really liked about the event was that people stopped and took a picture with me after I handed them their award certificate. That was a fun surprise and ended up being a really nice way to pair each person with a tweet provided by the person who nominated them. We will be releasing the pictures along with the text of the tweet that accompany each winner over the next couple of weeks with the hashtag, “#ITSExcel” … thanks, Barry!
[/et_pb_text][et_pb_code admin_label=”Code”]<center><a class=”twitter-timeline” href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/ITSExcel” data-widget-id=”762317046382227456″>#ITSExcel Tweets</a> <script>!function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?’http’:’https’;if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+”://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”;fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,”script”,”twitter-wjs”);</script></center>[/et_pb_code][/et_pb_column][/et_pb_row][et_pb_row admin_label=”row”][et_pb_column type=”4_4″][et_pb_text admin_label=”Award Remarks Text” background_layout=”light” text_orientation=”left” use_border_color=”off” border_color=”#ffffff” border_style=”solid”]
2016 Excellence Awards Remarks
Good afternoon everyone. Thank you all so much for coming today.
The IT Services Excellence Awards are an annual recognition program where recipients are selected by nominations. Awardees are team members that have had a broad impact on IT Services, on the University of Chicago, or nationally regardless of their position in the organization.
The nominees are staff that have the most visible and positive impact in the areas of technology, service, and management to our collective work.
This year is no different, all of the nominees exhibited excellence in their work and were recognized by their peers for doing so.
In the past, I was never a huge proponent of organizational award programs, largely because I never won one, but as I have grown in my career I now see the absolute need to systematically find ways to recognize and reward people that consistently go above and beyond.
The winning of an award is often viewed as a destination that one arrives at, but being a part of our process is what has left a lasting impression on me.
We are working in an environment where so many of us are being asked to do so much on any given day that it can become easy to not stop and take the time to recognize the work our colleagues do. Taking the time to appreciate effort and to nominate someone for that effort is a wonderful show of understanding. An understanding of how hard it is to make an impact. An understanding of how much it means to the rest of us. An understanding that we are part of a larger community that deserves extra effort. To me, that is the real reason recognition like the Excellence Awards is truly important.
I mentioned that the process has left a lasting impression on me, here’s why. It has shown me that while there are challenges within our organization, there are also groups of people who care deeply about what we are trying to do for our University. Regardless of engagement scores, watching the level of enthusiasm people brought to their nominations further reinforced to me what is at the foundation of IT Services – a commitment to serving this amazing Institution.
At the end of the day you all make me very proud to be a part of this team and I want to sincerely thank the recipients for their tremendous work and for being recognized by your colleagues. I also want to thank those who took the time to nominate and to passionately tell the selection committee why those nominees are worthy of these awards. You all lifted the spirits of the committee with your passion.
And finally, I want to thank and recognize the committee members as well for taking the time to help make today happen. Our 2016 Excellence Award winners are:
Alan Takaoka, Anna Van Dellen, Cameron Spencer, Cheryl Johnson, Daniel Yu, Debbie Bomba, Dylan Westring, Eric Frazier, Eric Harrell, Hector Martinez, Jason Edelstein, Jessica Sandy, Kathy Cosgrove, Katie Kranz, Laji Thomas, Linda Turner, Manuel Amparan, Marc Vincent, Mark Bieri , Matt Zurek, Mike Pry, Mike Strode, Moid Syed, Pat Hickey, Patty Kim-Celmer, Rafael Sanchez, Ramu Pedada, Roberto Vera, Rodney Henderson, Ryan Harden, Sandeep Guntaka, Sherif Hassabo, Shontay Grant-Pinder, Tina Flowers Morris, and Tony Juarez.
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