What Does Social Media Mean For IT Services?

This talk will explore some of the key challenges social media and technologies are presenting to Information Services. Whilst there’s no doubting that Information Services is well placed to catalyse the use of these tools and help staff and students use them more effectively for their work, they also present significant cultural as well as practical challenges that need to be addressed. The effective use of social media will depend as much on winning over the hearts and minds of people as it will be about making tools available and training people to acquire the necessary IT skills.

The questions explored in this talk will concern what responsibility and role does Information Services have in making this change happen? How should we go about promoting and enabling people to work within the University in more social ways? What does it mean more directly in terms of change for the way staff in Information Services need to work themselves? It will also touch upon the growing significance of digital literacy in relation to social media use and the implications of this for Information Services.

Some ideas and suggestions will be offered about where our effort and focus might best be placed so as to enable the University to become more social in the way that it works.

Look forward to seeing you there.