In order to refocus the service panel IT-CDA group and IT in general are offering, the project aims at understanding the user community better and evaluating their habits, use cases, why they made some choices, what software they are using, which public services they prefer using instead of central IT services and why.

Outline

The CERN computing user community is very heterogeneous consisting of people having varying backgrounds and working environments. There are over 30000 external and internal computer users at CERN belonging to over 15 departments and these users have different habits and methods of working. In addition, user preferences are very strong in terms of hardware and software, which makes it impossible to propose closed solutions for services delivery.

A User Survey

The IT-CDA group is concerned with the way users collaborate, their devices and their software applications and during 2016-2017 IT-CDA carried out a survey asking users questions concerning their preferences and the software that they used. Over 1200 users replied to the survey giving a five month snapshot and the results were presented in the May 2017 ITUM.

New User Survey

The 2016-17 survey showed a correlation between the user replies and their ages. Understanding the preferences of the younger and new users to CERN would be beneficial to IT-CDA. To this end a new survey was created targeting CERN’s new arrivals. A link to the survey has been place by HR on the ‘onboarding project’ pages that are part of the integration process.