1. Bad News Messages: How Much and How Often?
Carlyn Chatfield
Manager, IT Technical Communications
August 14, 2009
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes,
provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

2. Major Service: Hardware Failure on 1 of 3 Servers (i.e. Email)
Whom to tell?
Only those affected
Everyone, in case someone unaffected is waiting for the affected person to respond
How much, how often?
If scheduled, twice: 48 hours and 24 hours in advance
If unscheduled, voic broadcast once, refer to web site for future updates
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

3. Major Service: Hardware Failure on only Server (i.e. Mailman)
Whom to tell?
Everyone
How much, how often?
If scheduled, 1 week then 48 and 24 hours in advance
If unscheduled, immediately (tricky when all the mailing lists are down!) and every 4 hours until restored
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

4. Campus-wide Storage: Dept-shared directories down
Whom to tell?
Department representatives
Everyone
How much, how often?
If scheduled, 48 and 24 hours in advance
If unscheduled, immediately and every 4 hours until restored
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

5. University web site: 4 hours of Scheduled Maintenance
Whom to tell?
Everyone
Maybe publish warning on home page
How much, how often?
If scheduled, in advance 3 weeks then 1 week then 48 and 24 hours in advance
If unscheduled, tell everyone immediately
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

6. Communications Problem: High Maintenance Time Frame
Summer days and other off-peak academic time windows = high amount of IT maintenance work
Too many messages diluting channel effectiveness
Solution: one weekly update to all
Supplement with IT-Alerts (subscribed list)
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

7. Channels: push or pull messages?
Web site: only seen if someone checks
Voic broadcast: good for emergency IT messages, but only for employees since most students use personal cell phones
Mailing lists: good unless is down
Limit use or your messages will be ignored
Manual list: good for IT emergencies
Blog: good for extended outages
Update every 1-2 hours for the folks who want to know the details
Systems status page: good if can be fed automatically
Text: best way to get brief message to staff in field
Twitter: good if you’ve trained your audience to use it
Facebook: not good for bad messages unless…
Future work web page: good for scheduled maintenance
Login pages for systems affected: good for scheduled maintenance
Weekly update: new for summer 2009, good for multiple scheduled outages
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

8. Rice’s IT Communications Channels
Web site (new, launched 8/12/09)
Voic broadcast: used rarely, prefer other channels
Mailing lists: subscribe to IT-Alerts, RSS for IT-Alerts
Manual list: Excel, managed by Carlyn
IT Extended Outage Blog
Systems status page
Text: Private to IT staff with emergency contact info in Rice’s data base; IT-headsup is a subset of Rice’s MIR3 tool for crisis communications
Twitter: RiceITweets (new services, reminders, not bad news)
Facebook: Joe ITguy, a summer fling for in-coming students, not utilized much in school year; rarely for outages
Metrics (planned outages, maintenance)
Login pages (add notes when apps affected): OWL-Space (course management), webmail, webcal
Weekly update ( contained only summary with link to web page for details)
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.

9. What’s next? More on mobiles Audio from Emergency phone poles Others?
Cell phones as primary communication channel for all messages
Audio from Emergency phone poles
Campus emergencies, brief message broadcast (outside only, probably not used for IT messages)
Others?
Copyright Carlyn Foshee Chatfield, This work is the intellectual property of the author. Permission is granted for the material to be shared for non-commercial, educational purposes, provided this copyright statement appears in the reproduced materials and notice is given to the author. To disseminate otherwise or to republish requires written permission from the author.