Why a survey?
HIFIS provides numerous IT services for Helmholtz and collaboration partners, ranging from cloud and technology services to education, consulting, and community building. From users of these services, we obtain feedback on the quality and potential future developments via various channels. On top of that, we are especially interested in obtaining information from colleagues in Helmholtz that are not already closely related to HIFIS services. We would like to know more on users’ needs and wishes, and maybe organisational bottlenecks, so we can address these in our future service portfolio.
With this motivation in mind, we surveyed a randomly selected subset of employees of the participating Helmholtz centres (15 of 18 queried centres plus Head Office took part) and asked them to anonymously report on their usage and practices of IT services in their field of work, also on software development practices, if that applied for the questioned user.
Results
We were able to obtained responses from 15 Helmholtz centres and the Head Office. A total of 594 participants responded to the HIFIS Survey 2021 between May and August 2021. After filtering for inconsistent and too incomplete responses, a total of 411 responses were analyzed.
Approximately 55% of them were from researchers, the remaining fraction was distributed between Administrative, Infrastructure and IT staff. All six research areas were represented.
Results are presented and discussed in an analysis report that is available here.
Data and Analysis Repositories
The data and the complete analysis pipeline as well as the report sources are available publicly. You are invited to check the data and/or do your own analyses. If you happen to find new interesting results, we’d appreciate if you tell us!
- The data set, excluding free text answers, is provided here: https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/hifis/overall/surveys/survey-2021/data
- The analysis scripts and report sources are located here: https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/hifis/overall/surveys/survey-2021/analysis
- The analysis backend is built on the HIFIS Surveyval Framework, which can be found here: https://codebase.helmholtz.cloud/hifis/overall/surveys/hifis-surveyval
Write us if you are interested on details for these.
Further analysis
Based on the primary analysis summarised in the report, it can already be stated that further information can likely be derived for specific sub-groups in additional analyses. This may yield useful insights on how to shape HIFIS services towards these groups.
Stay tuned!
Comments and Suggestions
If you have suggestions or questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.