Networking and Telecommunications

Results of CNS's Future Needs Survey

Margaret Baker

Many campus departments helped us in May and June by answering questions in a "Future Needs Survey" which was mailed to campus departments. As the cover letter explained, as part of Project Vocal (Voice Options for Cal) we were asking for input to our planning process for future telephone services on campus. The survey was distributed in May; by June, 186 departments had responded, and we are already making use of the responses in our discussions with communications vendors and in our planning.

We thought that you might like to know a little about what we learned, and we have three ways for you to find out. First, this article covers some of the most important questions we asked. Second, a longer discussion of the results, Results of CNS' 1998 Future Needs Survey (http://cns.berkeley.edu:5033/margaret/Survey/report.html), is available online. Finally, you too can analyze the raw data by calling up the Survey Research Center Data Archive (http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7502/src/) and conducting your own analysis.* In any event, that website is where you can find the full texts of the questions and the frequencies and percentages for answers to each question.

The heart of the survey was Question 8, which asked whether the departments desired any in a list of 11 features. If you want to read descriptions of these features, see the Question 8 writeup on the Project Vocal Home Page (http://amber.berkeley.edu:5033/Vocal/). The overall ranking of desirability, combining "definitely" with "probably" want or need it, was:

%	FEATURE	% WEIGHTED	CHANGE
97.5	Voicemail	99.7	+ 2.2
78.3	Unified messaging	87.1	8.8
72.7	Telecommuting feature set	78.0	5.3
72.2	Voice over IP	85.6	13.4
63.6	Automated attendant	74.1	10.5
59.6	Wireless or cordless phones	74.0	14.4
55.7	Automated notification systems	68.4	12.7
49.4	Computer/telephony integration	62.1	12.7
44.2	Speech to text / text to speech	49.3	5.1
33.3	Automatic call distribution	46.9	13.6
22.3	Predictive dialing	28.2	5.9

An interesting twist was to look at the relative popularity of features weighted by the number of telephone lines in each department. This means that instead of each department being one data record, each was counted in once for each telephone line they mentioned in answering Question 2. The result is that the bigger departments are counted hundreds of times (the total is 9,813 lines represented). Although the popularity of each of the features went up, the rankings changed very little ("Voice over IP" jumped ahead of "Telecommuting feature set" in popularity). Wireless showed the greatest increase in desirability, from 59.6 to 74.0 percent.

A question that is of great importance to CNS--and to our customers too--was Question 5, "In general, how satisfied are you with the telecommunication products and services you currently receive from Telecommunications (now part of Communication and Network Services)?" The answers both pleased us and alerted us to how much work we still have to do:

17.3%	Very satisfied
68.5	Somewhat satisfied
11.1	Somewhat dissatisfied
3.1	Very dissatisfied

The responses also verified how great a concern money is, both to the campus and to individual departments; we were reminded of how tough it is for a department to move from one system to another; and we learned from the many valuable comments that some departments added.

We truly appreciate the input we got and the insights we gained into the campus's needs. We will be making use of the data in all of our planning processes.

The archive uses the Survey Documentation and Analysis software developed and supported by another IST unit, the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program.

I thought the analysis software was a lot of fun to use and you may also!