Quietish blogging time at the moment - lots of time being spent doing stuff I can't write about, including some HR work and marking funding submissions.
I have had time though to take part in a few other interesting meetings this week. We've produced an updated Data Quality Policy for our corporate data which will hopefully be approved fairly soon. In terms of quality we're looking at relevance, correctness, completeness and timeliness of the data in our systems, and we've put together a series of aims and objectives, as well as examples of good practice supporting the quality of data. It will be published and available soon.
Changes to our change management system are about to be introduced, which will see a more active approach to approving changes instead of the more passive "if we don't object you can do it" system we have at the moment. The CAB (change advisory board) will move from virtual to physical, at least for a trial period.
I've also had some discussions with other senior members of the department about communication, especially feeding back both during and after conferences, seminars, and other events. I'm obviously a great believer in doing that using social media - the whole reason I set this blog up was to answer the question from my department, "what do you do?" I felt it was particularly important to feedback on conference sessions, link to to relevant information and presentations, say what I thought was interesting or relevant etc. With the advert of twitter and hashtags, you can now feedback during the conference itself, allowing people to keep up with events who aren't there, share important information, links etc. I've followed a number of conferences recently from the hashtag. Some have many people tweeting, some much fewer. The most recent was the AHUA (Association of Heads of University Administration aka Registrars) Conference, thanks to the lone tweeting Registrar from Nottingham University, Paul Greatrix. Fascinating to see the things they were discussing, although I understood he got the mickey taken out of him by the rest, but as he said, leadership is hard!
So, there's been some discussion here about why the other members of the Exec, and indeed the rest of the section heads, don't do it, and whether they should. I have my own view, obviously, and there have been others expressed, but if you have a view, then put it in the comments. Would be interested to know.
5 comments:
I love the realtime conference updates via Twitter. Much more immediate than information that may or may not be circulated sometime later. E.g. Its possible for followers to chip in or ask relevant questions whilst it's possible to get feedback at the event.
I tried it myself for the first time at the SAP User Conference and it's was simple enough to relay the main points of the keynote speeches. The other interesting benefit of this is virtual networking as several other delegates then connected to me on Twitter when they saw the conference tweets, including a colleague at another UK Uni.
I think it would be great if the rest of the Exec Team told us what was happening and what they were doing. Currently we have no idea. A blog seems the obvious way to do it - we even provide the software, and encourage other people to do it. Not a good example from us is it?
The growing community of Twitter users in HE is becoming a very useful communications medium, particularly at events away from the campus. The recent UCISA Management Conference had a number of delegates from other institutions that I follow who provided a worthwhile commentary of the event - I follow these Tweeters because the are informative - I often 'unfollow' people who don't provide me with things I want to know. Of course, for events like this, the #Hashtag is invaluable.
I follow a number of people from a couple of events I have attended over the last year who keep me informed about things happening in the sector - I hope I do the same for them occasionally.
Blog posts are also useful but are often after the event and tend to be much more longwinded - this can make it more difficult to select what, and how much, to read.
Getting any sort of feedback more widely across the different sections of the department would be very useful.
Not from Sheffield, but agree with points made by other commenters. Twitter invaluable for following events, and for taking part in discussions during them. Blogs good for more info on what sessions covered, and helps if their timely - yours normally are! You seem to be able to post not long after sessions finish, which is much more useful. So keep up the good work, and keep encouraging others.
Yes please - more comms from rest of executive would be appreciated. If its somewhere we can look at it when we choose, doesn't add to info overload.
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