Nice Article!
While most of the points were well thought out and explained, I am particularly fond of #10. I don't know if you intentionally saved the best for last, but I definitely feel like it is perhaps the most valuable, and probably most underutilized, of all.
I am an IT Manager responsible for our Customer Service Operations in support of 1700 customers. I also sit on our Architectural Review Board, where we strategize where IT services and support are required in our company. This group of individuals and managers is in constant struggle with the concept of sharing communications with our population. For me, it is like pulling teeth to get an email sent communicating an outage, a change or any other event that *might* impact the business. I have a good relationship with my manager, which is the only reason I did this: I asked him how much he was charged per email. He said, "Nothing. What do you mean?" I said that I thought he must be charged per email since he was so reluctant to send them when something happened. That was a few weeks ago. Since that time, he has sent several proactive emails, telling people about problems as they are occurring and before the impact is being felt. This has had a very positive impact on the Help Desk personnel, in terms of call volume and also in terms of being valued enough by the organization that they are immediately informed of what is going on.
We are also establishing an "Outages" notification list that people can sign up for and get notified when events occur. What we don't have is a "good" solution for this. We thought about using a simple email distribution list in Outlook, but it is difficult to have people sign up for that. We thought about using MailMan or PHPList also. If anyone has other suggestions, I would be interested to hear them!
