The first session I attended this morning was presented by Karen M. Hackett and Jim Leous from Penn State University.
Both explained how the ITS department at Penn State has moved into the “communication age” (my words, not theirs) by adopting the very disruptive approach of “radical transparency.”
While IT departments usually are known to work on/fix things without communicating a lot, Penn ITS has realized how crucial communications can be… especially when things don’t work anymore.
As a result, they’ve started to embrace this new approach switching from secrecy to transparency, communicating early and often and using new technologies such as blogs, wikis, delicious and RSS to deliver their messages to end users and support staff.
Launched earlier this year, the individual blogs written by several team members (but all mashed up together via RSS on a portal-like intranet) have been used to share meeting minutes, reports about professional development sessions and to replace some of the email exchanged between team members.
The goal of this “cultural change” as Leous put it is really to go from an emailing-list-based system to a web-based system supported and customized by the end users, a system supported by RSS feeds.
To learn more about radical transparency, Jim Leous directed attendees to this Wired article: The See-Through CEO
And, here’s a link to Jim’s blog.