Committee examines info dissemination

On a typical day, Duke students, faculty and staff have access to countless announcements, reports and other forms of internal communication, yet many feel they are not getting the information they need.

  

 Now, a University committee seeks to reorganize Duke's internal information strategy to help members of the community wade through the media and identify relevant information in a timely fashion. By the end of the semester, the committee will prepare a series of recommendations to be considered by president-elect Richard Brodhead.

  

 "If you look at the amount of money that is spent on the various publications and other forms of communication, it's a lot. And yet people still feel disconnected," said David Jarmul, associate vice president of News and Communications and chair of the communications committee. "There's something wrong with that picture."

  

 Paul Grantham, communications director for the Office of Human Resources and vice chair of the committee, said Duke's problem is not a dearth of information. "There are plenty of websites, newsletters, e-mail lists and meetings and such," he said. "The biggest problem seems to be more in how to coordinate communication in ways that make information more accessible and useful."

  

 "The Duke calendar typically did not reflect the events for those schools and departments and vice versa," Grantham said. "Depending on which calendar you use, you are only getting a fragmented perception of what is happening on any given day at Duke."

  

 The 18-member committee, commissioned by Senior Vice President for Public Affairs and Government Relations John Burness, is comprised of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty and staff from both the campus and medical center.

  

 Grantham said members of the committee have focused on three major areas since it was formed: taking inventory of the existing communications environment, assessing the needs of the University's various internal audiences and identifying the best ways in which other universities and organizations deal with internal communication.

  

 Nelson noted that Duke's problems with communication are by no means unique to the University. "It's a universal problem," she said. "One of our subcommittees was hoping to be able to find some of the best practices at other institutions, but wasn't really able to come back and say, 'Yes, they're doing it so much better at another University.'"

  

 Although committee members have already identified some existing problems--many of them unsurprising--Jarmul said they will continue to gather information before fleshing out recommendations.

  

 "We're still trying to understand what's happening around the Duke community," Jarmul said. "How are people getting information? How are they not getting information? What are their frustrations with the current system?"

  

 Jarmul noted that the committee's recommendations will likely be both short- and long-term.

  

 "If there are things we can do immediately to improve the situation, we will certainly be looking at those opportunities," he said. "But my suspicion is that nibbling around the edge of the problem isn't going to solve it. We need to think much more broadly about different kinds of systems--perhaps even fundamentally different approaches Duke might take."

  

 One of the biggest challenges the committee faces is determining the most effective forms of communication for the University's various audiences. Jarmul noted that, although content will also certainly be an issue, the delivery of information is a key focus for the committee.

  

 "The way we get information out to students might be quite different than we would to a housekeeper or someone in a research lab," he said. "People of different occupations and ages absorb information in different ways."

  

 Senior Priscilla Mpasi, a member of the committee, noted, for example, that undergraduates can access information via e-mail, print or face-to-face interactions, to name a few of the available avenues of communication. Yet when the new short-term illness policy went into effect last semester, Mpasi said, many students were unaware that anything had changed.

  

 "There was an article in The Chronicle, but you can't guarantee that all undergraduates are going to read The Chronicle," she said. She noted that most students check their e-mail at least one to three times a day, making it a potentially effective means of communication.

  

 She added that even with e-mail, however, students do not get important information. "The information is being sent out, but it's up to students to decide whether they're going to retrieve it," she said.   

 "If a student doesn't think an e-mail pertains to them, they delete it."

  

 Jarmul noted that the committee is cognizant of the fact that many employees do not use the Internet to the extent that students and faculty do.

  

 For the most part, however, the committee will take heed of the increasingly prominent role the Internet is playing in internal communications. "The web is an extraordinarily powerful tool that enables us to communicate in ways we need to think about totally differently than we did before," Burness said.

  

 In particular, the committee is taking a close look at several portal projects--including the new DukePass web portal for undergraduate students, a web portal used by the Fuqua School of Business and a portal-like project at the School of Medicine--that serve as information hubs for their target audiences.