IT survey follow-up

IT Satisfaction Survey: Follow up and action plan

by James Osborne

Last month I provided feedback on the colleague IT Satisfaction Survey, which we ran earlier in the year. This month, I am providing a follow-up on the key themes and actions we will be implementing following the survey.

The main themes and concerns from your feedback were:

Slow logins Changing passwords/ password lockout Contacting IT and service desk

Knowledge and competence in using key business systems

Slow logins

We fixed the widespread slow login problems that you experienced last year by implementing a piece of software called FXLogix.

On average, we expect the login timeframe to be around 20-30 seconds, excluding any time the system is waiting for you to type a password or enter multi-factor authentication. If you are finding logging in is taking longer than 30 seconds, please report it to the IT service desk.

Make sure you you include your specific circumstances such as, when and where you logged on so we can see how widespread the problem is and investigate it.

This also applies to logging in to the Rivers Meet Wifi, so please report any issues you have with this too.

Joel is currently creating some guidance, that will help identify potential issues if you experience slow logins or repeated login attempts and we will publish this shortly.

Password changes and lockouts

This is a common problem, which becomes more complicated by the number of devices and different mechanisms that may be involved in a password change or unlock.

Your account could also be locked out because someone else is trying to login as you. So, login security remains vital for maintaining our cyber security. Thankfully, best practice has evolved and this means that passwords don’t need to be changed quite so often or be so complex.

Mark will be investigating a suitable new password policy, which will take these things into account.

As a result, we expect our password length will need to increase up 12 characters (including spaces) but will not need to be quite so complex (things like inclusion of mixed case and special characters). We will also only require you to change your password every 120 days, rather than every 60 days as we do currently.

Please remember that, your devices will also need to be regularly used and kept updated to remain compliant.

Once the password policy is finalised, IT will produce the a simple guide to changing or unlocking your password, which will help reduce the frustration you reported in changing passwords and getting locked out of our systems.

Contacting IT and the service desk

We’re aware that contacting the team or service desk has become more difficult under hybrid working. The survey results showed that most colleagues prefer to contact us in person however, with most colleagues, including the IT team, prefering to work from home, there is somewhat of a disconnect here.

To ensure we can easily provide support for the organisation, the IT team always have a team member available in the office between 8:30am to 5pm Monday to Friday (excluding public holidays) in line with our customer opening hours. However, as with most teams, it can be harder to maintain this when colleagues have holidays or are ill.

We recognise from your feedback, that providing cover at the start of the day seems to be the most important and, while some IT colleagues choose start at 8:00am, this is not a contractual requirement. However, we hope to be able to provide more support on the service desk when our new IT Support Apprentice joins us in September.

Joel is also investigating a new Service Desk product, most likely linked to Teams, which will make it easier to contact anyone on the team who is working. We’d like to see a simple chat to service desk feature, which will allow you to contact us more easily and see when we are busy.

Knowledge and competence in using key business systems

It’s very important that we have knowledgeable and competent colleagues using our processes, systems, and data. This is currently a corporate wide initiative being driven by the people team.

However, I expect to identify the extent of this issue and be able to suggest solutions when the iGov team completes its Record of Processing Activities (RoPA), which is a register of all processes, systems and data used throughout the organisation.

It's been really useful analysing all of your feedback, confirming some issues that we knew about and were working on, as well as some we weren’t.

Thanks again to everyone who completed the survey, which will help us provide better solutions to you going forward.