Results of the survey on the services provided by RedIRIS to associated institutions

The purpose of this survey is to measure the degree of user satisfaction with the services provided, in order to adapt these to their needs


MADRID, 21/01/09. RedIRIS distributed an online survey carried out among the users of its associated institutions to determine the overall degree of satisfaction with the services provided. The survey was also distributed on paper among the attendees at the Technical Conferences held in Alcala de Henares on 19 and 21 November 2008.

The questionnaire used consisted of different blocks of questions (type of institution, professional profile, network services, security services, authentication services, e-mail services, multimedia services, collaborative services, mobility services, services deployment, event organisation and events content). It included a total of 45 questions.
As regards participation, most of the surveys received (58%) were completed by university staff. With respect to professional profile, most of the participants manage networks/computer resources and are network and/or computer services technicians.
    After processing the results of these surveys, the following conclusions were drawn:

    By giving the users the possibility, for the first time, of completing the surveys online, the number of surveys received (226 completed surveys) increased sevenfold, which represents a significant increase in participation. Nevertheless, we would like participation to continue to grow, as we currently have more than 350 associated institutions, and obtaining a generalised opinion from these would help us to improve the services we offer the RedIRIS Community. Having this information is very important, as it is the most general of the procedures currently being carried out to directly value users' perception of the services offered or their level of use in the academic community. It also helps us to detect service needs not covered by us or to verify whether or not certain services should continue to be provided even if they are not frequently demanded.

    The overall results obtained in the survey are clearly positive, as most of the surveyed subjects marked "very good" or "good" as their answers, while few gave evaluations of "average" (between 0 and 10% depending on the service) and very few gave negative evaluations (between 0 and 3% depending on the service). Connectivity services, eduroam mobility, IRIS-CERT security, SCS authentication services, RACE e-mail services and FTP collaborative services were the most highly valued among the RedIRIS Community. Some specific network services such as NOC, secondary DNS and NTP also obtained good scores. As regards dissemination and event organisation, the evaluation was also significantly positive, with organisation of work groups, technical conferences and the security forum receiving the best scores.

    Due to its renewed image and information structure, the www.rediris.es website received a higher evaluation than in surveys carried out in previous years (64% of the persons surveyed answered “very good” or “good”). The RedIRIS newsletter obtained the same percentage for the aforementioned evaluation levels.

    Despite the fact that the results are clearly positive, we are concerned by the users' lack of awareness of the services that we offer. On occasions it could be due to the fact that a specific service is aimed at institution service administrators, and the rest of the users are not aware of the use of this service by their institutions. In other cases, the services are aimed at very specific communities, which means that part of the RedIRIS Community users are unaware of is existence.

    At RedIRIS we aim to provide more information on all our services to ensure they everyone knows about them; it is important for users to be aware of the services we offer and have an overall knowledge of them, as a service that is not currently required by an institution could be needed in the future.

If you are interested in finding out more about the RedIRIS services you can consult the information that appears at: http://www.rediris.es/servicios/. Upon accessing each service, you will find descriptive information about the service, as well as information on use and access requirements. Some of the services also provide service statistics and additional information.

Thank you very much for your collaboration!