Note: This message was sent by email to the Stanford community on Aug. 1, 2024, from CIO Council co-chairs Steve Gallagher and Richard Webber.
Thank you for participating in Stanford’s 2024 IT Client Satisfaction survey. We appreciate the thoughtful feedback you’ve shared about your technology needs, which provides us valuable insight into where to focus our improvement efforts.
At a high level, your feedback centered around:
- The need for continual improvement of Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity
- Your desire for increased IT support beyond standard business hours
- Clarification of IT support paths
- The collective experience of “friction” around security and authentication
For those of you interested in seeing survey results in their entirety, the aggregated and anonymized 2024 IT Client Satisfaction Survey results are now available on our Stanford IT Community website.
Although some of these findings are similar to what we heard from you in 2022, it’s important to note we’ve prioritized our funding requests and efforts in the last few years to tackle these challenges directly.
Wi-Fi and Cellular Connectivity
In the last two years, we’ve focused our energy on improving Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity in student residences, academic buildings, and critical service areas on an accelerated timeline. We continue to partner with other campus organizations, including Residential & Dining Enterprises, Department of Public Safety, Environmental Health & Safety, Land, Buildings & Real Estate, and Stanford Healthcare.
In FY24, we began a significant three-year capital-funded project to rapidly upgrade Wi-Fi across the campus. Beyond a simple hardware upgrade, we’re ensuring the design meets ongoing and flexible network connectivity needs. This approach enables us to proactively identify and resolve issues and improve experiences for our students, faculty, and staff.
For cellular connectivity, we’ve addressed needs for 11 buildings that support teaching, learning, and university operations. These efforts continue with the approval of a three-year capital-funded project to improve and expand cellular signal for student residences, academic buildings, and outdoor areas, and to bolster cellular capabilities and availability for critical safety and emergency locations. In FY25, we’ll implement emergency power for the entire cellular infrastructure, address cellular signal coverage deficiencies in critical locations (e.g., emergency assembly areas, garages), and continue to address coverage gaps.
Security and Authentication
We recognize security and authentication as a point of tension, and strive to balance our role in safeguarding data, email, and other potentially sensitive information while minimizing friction around access.
To address this tension, we’ve begun an initiative that aims to address limitations in the current implementation of Cardinal Key and improve your experience, while maintaining robust security standards. Our goal is to ensure all Stanford affiliates are able to securely access university systems and applications using compliant devices, while minimizing or eliminating friction.
What’s Next
As we analyze these results in a deeper fashion at the school and unit level, we’ll continue to use this feedback to prioritize our upcoming initiatives and funding requests. Through the fall, we’ll share additional updates on what we’ve been doing to address your feedback, and ensure you have the most up-to-date information about the services and support our IT organizations provide.
