Tag: communications

Internal Think Tanks for Innovation and Team-Building: Abstract

Think tanks are usually associated with non-profit organizations and institutes that perform research and provide advice on subjects such as public policy, technology, culture, economics, and so on. But your IT organization can stretch that term to cover a group of staff members who convene to generate innovative ideas that can be acted upon to improve the overall functioning of their department and the institution that it serves. An internal think tank is also a way for staff to share ideas that may not otherwise have a proper place to be heard and discussed. It gives motivated staff a forum to change and improve the workplace status quo.

At Fordham University, our IT organization implemented the “Innovation Group,” a collection of staff from IT and other university departments who met regularly to brainstorm, research, and carry out ideas to improve the workplace environment, build a stronger sense of community among IT staff and others in the university, and enhance the integration of technology within the university.

This paper gives an overview of the Innovation Group’s goals and methods for organizing and carrying out ideas. It describes some of its successful initiatives and the benefits incurred. It also briefly reviews some of the challenges the group encountered and group’s next phase, which will be based on lessons learned from the Innovation Group’s first incarnation.

This paper will be delivered at the SIGUCCS 2016 Conference, November 06-09, 2016, Denver, CO, USA. It will be published in the Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Annual Conference on SIGUCCS.
© 2016 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4095-3/16/11…$15.00
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2974927.2974932

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Abstract

Signed, Sealed, Delivered: Improving Your Messages to the Community

Abstract for workshop/paper I will give at the 2015 SIGUCCS Conference, in St. Petersburg, FL.

Whether it’s an outage, scheduled maintenance or an announcement about a new technology resource, the pressure is on you to create effective and readable messages.

Henry David Thoreau once said that he had received no more than one or two letters in his life that were worth the postage. thoreauTo be sure, most of your communications don’t require postage and won’t be cherished forever. But they should be worth the time it takes to read them.

University faculty, staff, and students are bombarded with hundreds of messages every day, from multiple sources. They appreciate it when your communications are organized, concise, and readable.

In this session, you’ll learn ways to improve written content for emails, blogs, and other communication channels. We’ll concentrate on how to cut the flab from your writing and strategies for organizing information. We’ll also cover how to choose the best words for promoting your organization’s resources and services.

Elizabeth Cornell is the IT Communications Specialist at Fordham University. Before that, she was post-doctoral fellow with the English Department at Fordham, where she taught composition and literature.