Patrick Cooley and the art of making sense

A lightning strike is an unusually forceful editor. It removes the option of beginning with good news. At EMC, one such strike caused an internal data center outage, leaving the technology organization with something to repair and something to explain. Patrick Cooley, then its senior manager of IT marketing and communications, directed the explanation. The resulting message addressed what had happened, the business consequences and what would change.

There is a whole profession tucked inside that last sentence. A technical incident supplies facts. An audience supplies questions. Getting those two things into a useful relationship takes judgment, particularly when the facts include a recovery plan that failed to work as intended. An outage gives every reader a reason to pay attention. It also gives them excellent grounds for impatience.

EMC CIO Vic Bhagat said the response included treating the episode as an opportunity to learn. For Cooley, the work offers a revealing introduction: helping a technology organization explain itself when the explanation actually matters.

A different seat at the technology table

Cooley’s remit at Commvault brings together CEO, executive and employee communications. Three audiences sit inside that title, each with its own expectations. The executive has a decision to explain; the employee has work affected by it. A message has to survive the journey between them.

The title also places him near a recurring difficulty in corporate life. A person who knows a subject thoroughly can find it surprisingly hard to explain where everybody else should begin. Familiarity removes the small steps. Acronyms acquire the status of ordinary nouns. A perfectly reasonable question starts sounding, to the expert, like a request to repeat the obvious.

For a company working in data protection and cyber recovery, these questions carry particular weight. The vocabulary describes systems, but the consequences concern an organization’s ability to continue working. A reader needs to understand what a technical capability allows people to do. Explaining that relationship requires care with scale, timing and responsibility. A claim about readiness raises different questions from an account of a completed recovery. Useful language keeps those distinctions visible, so that the audience can understand what is being offered and what still requires action. Precision gives a reader something firmer than reassurance.

This is where a communications professional earns a place in the room. The reader needs an entrance into the subject. Finding that entrance may require a different first paragraph, a more precise example or a question nobody at the table has thought to ask.

“People are bombarded constantly with information, so the issue is how to cut through the noise.”

Patrick Cooley, on IT communications

The career before the CIO’s office

Cooley graduated from Utica College in 1995 and began in technology public relations, working at an agency during the dot-com period before operating his own consultancy for technology startups. He later handled several EMC public relations programs, including customer stories and community involvement. Those assignments put a writer close to the practical business of deciding what a company has to say.

One public trace comes from October 2009, when he served as an EMC spokesperson on its planned North Carolina expansion. The announcement concerned a property near Research Triangle Park that would accommodate data centers and research facilities. Cooley supplied information about the company’s existing presence in the state.

It is a different communications task from explaining an outage. An expansion looks forward, while an incident requires an account of something that has already gone wrong. Both depend on getting the particulars straight. A reader should be able to distinguish an existing operation from an intention, a purchase from a plan and a promise from a completed result.

The advantage of an ordinary question

In his 2015 essay Making Sense of IT, Cooley described moving from EMC’s public relations team into its IT organization. He had already spent more than fifteen years in technology PR and marketing. A conversation with the CIO helped persuade him to take the new assignment.

His explanation made room for an admission: he approached technology as a user and had more to learn about its inner workings. That position gave him a perspective he could bring to the job. Expertise was present around him. The user’s experience deserved representation, too.

There is something useful in taking an ordinary question seriously. What will change on Monday? Who needs to do anything? Why should someone use this service? Those questions sound small beside a technical architecture. For the person trying to finish a day’s work, they are often the whole subject. Cooley’s choice of essay title kept the ambition plain: make sense of it.

Attention is part of the assignment

At EMC, Cooley worked on choosing channels and messages for different groups of users. Internal social communities and feedback around services offered alternatives to repeatedly emailing everybody. The organization’s size made audience selection a practical concern: a message appropriate for one group could become background noise for another.

Consider the difference between receiving a notice and recognizing that it applies to you. The first is a delivery event. The second requires context. A reader has to identify the relevance before the instructions can do their work. That is why the channel, the opening sentence and the timing belong in the same conversation.

A useful explanation also knows when to stop. Nobody opens an application notice hoping to discover an unexpected literary commitment. The craft involves giving the reader enough detail to proceed, while making further information easy to reach. Brevity becomes valuable when it preserves the answer.

Nineteen data centers, one account of the work

At Dell, Cooley was a named member of the team behind an annual report that won its category in Ragan’s 2018 Employee Communications Awards. The project concerned Dell Digital, an organization of 10,000 people formed after the Dell and EMC merger. Its integration work included nineteen global data centers, systems and hundreds of applications.

The report used a common methodology to organize that work, alongside infographics and images of team members. Its audiences included the technology organization, Dell’s wider workforce and external readers. An account of integration had to make sense to people standing at different distances from it.

An annual report imposes a useful editorial problem: which details allow readers to see the shape of a year? A project list records activity. An organizing idea can explain how that activity fits together. The award belonged to the team. Cooley’s place among its credited members adds a concrete piece of collaborative work to his career.

Returning with something to explain

In September 2018, Cooley returned to Utica as a speaker at the public relations program’s seventieth anniversary symposium. His session was called Keeping Pace with Technology. The agenda introduced an alumnus who had entered technology PR with little technical experience and built a career in a changing industry.

It is an apt subject for an alumni appearance. Students hear plenty about choosing a field. A working graduate can show how much learning happens after that choice. The assignment evolves; the vocabulary changes; yesterday’s comfortable explanation needs another draft.

Cooley also has a public relations credit on One EMC, which received two category awards in the 2008 WebAwards. Together, the website credit and the later speaking engagement show different settings for the same professional activity: helping information reach an audience through a form suited to the occasion.

The summer gathering has a washing-up problem

A July 2020 essay reveals another register. In Celebrating Plastic Free, Cooley offered practical suggestions for summer gatherings: shop locally, prepare food, use glasses and accept the washing up that reusable dishes require. He had taken the Plastic Free July challenge the previous year and planned to participate again.

He included a joke about sparing readers his vegetarian menu recommendations. The tone allowed an everyday inconvenience to remain inconvenient. Someone still has to wash the glasses. The suggestions gave readers choices they could picture making, without requiring a summer party to become a seminar.

That is a useful detail in a profile of a corporate communicator. Language can carry an argument while leaving the reader room to respond. A modest invitation, a recognizable situation and a little humor can make a practical point approachable.

Work beyond the announcement

Cooley’s public professional profile also records volunteering: video production for Greyhound Friends, events and fundraising with the Watertown Boys & Girls Club, and marketing communications mentoring through MicroMentor. A longer association with Boston Cares included recognition for more than a hundred volunteer hours in a year.

These activities give his communications career a distinctly local dimension. A corporate message can address a worldwide workforce; a volunteer contribution can help a nearby organization get something done. Both need a person willing to turn a useful skill toward somebody else’s immediate problem.

Across the public examples, Cooley’s work brings attention back to the recipient. The person reading an outage explanation wants to understand the consequences. The employee reading about integration needs an account that holds together. The reader considering reusable plates has a sink to contemplate. A good sentence makes room for the life on the other side of it.