A newsletter brought to you by the SJSU IT Division

Hello Campus Community:

For this IT newsletter, I will be sharing with you key customer measures for our IT Services Team along with additional updates about:

• Virtual Reality
• Customer Satisfaction Scores
• New Chat Feature
• SJSU Wireless (Wi-Fi) Service Update
• Academic Research Computing

Thank you for your time and please let me know if you have any questions or feedback about the information we are sharing with you today.

Best regards,

Bob Lim
Vice President Information Technology, and CIO

Virtual Reality Technology

SJSU Virtual Reality Program

We have launched the first phase of the SJSU Virtual Reality Program for classrooms by making VR headset loaner kits available to faculty and staff. Each loaner kit has four ClassVR virtual reality headsets and a quick start guide.

Faculty and students can check out the VR equipment from the Classroom Equipment Loaner Service in the IRC for evaluation in the classroom environment. The CATS and eCampus teams are available to provide assistance and support.

Other phases of the program will follow during the summer which will include the mobile classroom solution with 48 VR headsets for use in the classroom environment as part of the teaching process. For a complete description of the ClassVR Headset used in the loaner kits visit:

http://www.classvr.com/school-virtual-reality/student-vr-standalone-headset/

I want to thank James Morgan from the Department of Art and Art History, Robert Bruce Computer Engineering, and Jennifer Redd from the eCampus team, for their important partnership on this project.

For more information about the IT VR Program contact Mike Wardley, CATS/IT

SJSU IT Service Desk.  Photo by Robert Bain

Customer Satisfaction Measures and New Chat Feature

Accountability for Results!  This has become a central focus in both academia and business.  We are challenged to achieve effective and efficient results. Applying performance measurement to this purpose ensures alignment with our students, faculty, and staff.  We see ourselves as accountable for creating and carrying out activities and being responsible for achieving results – meeting goals, effecting change, and improving the quality of our SJSU IT services.

I wanted to reach out and follow up on our discussions about keeping everyone up to date on performance and quality measures for the IT Division and its alignment with the University’s goals.

One of the most critical areas that we manage is the Service Desk.  It has a large footprint in terms of having a significant impact on many of the students, faculty, and staff here at SJSU.  At some point, most everyone has called the Service Desk for technical help.  Whether it’s getting a password reset, software and application support, PC and hardware support, classroom support, etc., the call center touches many folks on campus.  We will continue to survey how well we are responding and solving customer issues and continue to share the information.

We have some analytical results for the last five months from November 2017, through March 2018 for customer satisfaction.  The essential points are as follows:

• 91.7% of Users of the Call Center were either Satisfied or Very Satisfied with their service.  The industry standard is 90%
• 85.1% of customer problems have gotten a resolution in our Call Center
• 79% resolved in less than 15 minutes for Classroom Support
• 99.3% resolved within the 3-day service level agreements for Classroom Support

I am pleased with the results as they are above industry averages.  Of course, we can do better, and as we continue to move forward into 2018, I will continue to share with you our performance measures.  We are also developing additional analytics to better measure our customer satisfaction and determine areas where we can improve in. I want to extend a special thanks to Sharon Watkins, Janice Lew, Alfred Eclipse and Talanda Williams and all of the hard-working students on the help desk and the classroom support team led by Darlene Bargas and Rod Maciel.

As part of improving the service desk, we have a new Live chat feature which allows you to get in touch with an IT Technician without having to pick up the phone or wait in line.  This new tool has resulted in faster response times and improved customer service.  To access the live chat tool, visit any SJSU IT web page and wait a few seconds for the chat window to appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen.  I wish to extend a special thanks to Sharon Watkins, Leon Nguyen and Alfred Eclipse for making Live Chat a success!

SJSU Student using Wi-Fi.      Photo by Robert Bain 

SJSU Wireless (Wi-Fi) Service Update 

SJSU Information Technology Division is a data-driven organization, and I wanted to share with you some critical data about our Wi-Fi performance for the Campus.

As background, the CSU Chancellor selected SJSU to be the first of the six CSU campuses to upgrade its internet connection from 10GB to 100GB coming this July. The added capacity will serve SJSU growing data needs well into the future and specifically support the growth of university research and the data infrastructure it requires. This massive expansion in bandwidth will help SJSU to become an even more significant player in research opportunities.

Below are some key measures and details about our SJSU Wi-Fi.

• During the past six months, the SJSU Wi-Fi network has hosted an average of 20,000 client devices daily.  Some other key statics are as follows:
  • Overall network availability is 99.54%.  This consistently exceeded the established campus benchmark of 99%
  • In terms of support desk, during this six-month period, we have less than 1% of all help desk call/ticket for Wi-Fi outage
• We have a network of over 2,600 Wi-Fi access point
• Significantly expanded our network coverage which has resulted in widespread Wi-Fi coverage on the main campus

Also, during this period, SJSU guest access was significantly simplified to conform to standard non-authenticated public Wi-Fi access (such as airports and hotels.)  Users now only need to accept the University’s Acceptable User Policy and online access is immediately available. Overall, it’s essential to all of us that access for guest Wi-Fi is a positive experience at SJSU. It is often the first impression a visitor has of the University.

We have simplified the guest login process considerably by driving improvements including:

• The elimination of the user authentication requirement
• Significantly increased the speed and the length of session timeouts during idle activity periods
• Users of the service now only need to accept the University’s Acceptable Use Policy (Terms of Use) with a single screen click to access the Internet quickly.

A Special thanks to Shai Silberman, Steve Chang, and Steve McAulay

We are not done yet; projects are currently underway to improve/expand Wi-Fi coverage in the Campus Village and the CEFCU Stadium with planned completion by mid-summer 2018.

A High-Performance cluster

Academic Research Activities

The Information Technology Division continues to proactively collaborate with campus stakeholders on research IT computing, networking, and as well as grant initiatives for high-performance computing (HPC).

Part of this effort in supporting academic research activities, the IT Division has created our very first Research CyberInfrastructure plan.  We have put in place the plans to build a high speed, low latency research network on campus.  This network will have speeds of 40GB and 100GB, and this will allow high-speed connections between the two campus’ high-performance computing systems, and the Engineering and Science buildings. The plan is also designing the new ISB (the interdisciplinary science building) to have fiber access for high-speed connectivity for research activities. The build-out of the research network will also help SJSU to attract and receive additional research grants which will leverage our investment in our Research CyberInfrastructure.

A big thank you to Shai Silberman and Atul Pala for their leadership and work on this project.

Best Regards,
Bob Lim