2007 CSOM IT - Faculty Survey Executive Summary

Background

The purpose of the Carlson School of Management Department of Information Technology Faculty Survey was to gather relevant information from Carlson School faculty regarding available information technology services and support. In general, Carlson School IT wished to explore overarching questions, such as to what extent IT services or support is valued, to what extent do IT services or support perform in those valued areas, and to listen for any “gaps” in technology services and support.

Overview of Results

Most Carlson faculty seek help with information technologies either a few times a month or a few times a year. Overall, faculty tend to feel comfortable or very comfortable with information technologies. However, when faculty do contact the support staff for assistance, it is typically for help in managing day-to-day tasks. In general, the majority of faculty interact with their local cluster IT support staff, but many faculty still do seek assistance at the Carlson Help Desk or other local IT staff at Carlson.

Faculty typically contact local IT support staff in person and prefer to receive support in person. Most faculty either indicated a rating of "highly value" or "value" in having local IT staff available in their clusters. Around 50% of faculty indicated the most frequent performance rating as “satisfied.” Carlson faculty rated the service performance of the Carlson Help Desk at a similar rating of 55% of faculty indicated feeling “satisfied.”

Faculty ranked Responsiveness, Expertise and Availability (phone/email) were the top three "highly valued" IT staff characteristics .  The resulting performance rating of these characteristics was most frequently listed as “good.” When faculty were asked how disruptive IT staff turnover was their work, the results varied, which may indicate faculty have different perceptions or experiences regarding service disruptions.

When Carlson faculty were asked to rate the “value” of various IT services and then rate the “performance” of these same services the results were helpful. Carlson classroom support was given the highest “highly value” rating at around 44%. However, it is possible that some measurement error may occur with this item as some qualitative comments (in the comments box at the end survey and in the pilot of the survey) suggested faculty may not distinguish between local Carlson classroom support and Central UMN classroom support.  Carlson research databases received the highest “not applicable” rating at around 38%. This rating may indicate that faculty may not be aware offered services for research databases or that the service is specific to a select group.  When asked to indicate which technology services/items faculty "would like to learn more about" from a list of eight items, the top selected items were “creating webpages,” “creating video clips,” and “research support.”  Finally, faculty were asked how prepared or unprepared they felt in moving to the new MS Office 2007. The results of the question varied a great deal. These results may need to be explored with more detail, e.g. it could indicate different audiences requiring different kinds of communication about the transition, among other things.  

There was an open-ended question at the end of the survey and some themes emerged in the comments. Some answers expressed dissatisfaction with an incident and provided examples (typically non-responsiveness or feeling a bother when asking for help.)  Another issue that surfaced in the comments was a theme of wanting to know about various expertise personnel at Carlson, e.g. a main contact for a certain kind of service or a contact for exploring specialty questions.

Looking Forward

The results of the survey provides possibilities for possible focus group sessions. For example, the results the rating the “value” of service characteristics in local IT support staff indicated three most highly valued characteristics of responsiveness, expertise and availability. However, the performance rating of these same characteristics may be a useful learn what faculty mean with these ratings and how faculty assess the performance or delivery upon those same characteristics.