University Operations Dashboard

This is the continuation of a transcript of a presentation by Stu Worman from Indiana University at an IT conference for unversity IT professionals.

Let me show you some of the information we have in our university’s operations dashboard. This is the month of August. This data is the number of connections. We run an automated program that cleans all the computers and makes sure that as students move into our campus housing that their computers has anti-virus software installed, has all the updates before we give them a network connection.

This is the month of August, and these are the new connections to our network from our campus housing. Guess what day this here? Move-in day. We know that on move-in day we had about 3,400 people connect successfully to our network.

You know why. The parents bring their kids. They are not going to leave until they can communicate with them. They have to have an email. They have to have a phone. They have be able to communicate. We have got this to a science.

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Let me show you some of the other things we are measuring here. These are the hours of the day of the connections. We know most people are trying to connect at 4PM. They get there at noon, 1 o’clock, carry the stuff in. By 2, 3, 4, they are connecting. They keep doing it until about 3AM, and at 4AM everyone must go to bed.

We actually licensed the program that does this called Get Connected to LSU. We have also found that all universities’ data looks exactly the same. Most students go to bed around 4AM.

We know what caused the errors. This is because they didn’t know their administrator password. We know how long it took them to install. We know what kind of chassis these people have. We know that 73% of the students that connected in our residence halls have a laptop or a notebook.

That's really valuable information. Because you know what it was last year? 49%. So we see this trend all at once. We used to give everybody a wired connection. And you know what now nobody wants that. They are used to a wireless network at home. They want to sit on their bed and connect from there.

Knowing that data is very helpful to us. This is IU Online, our software distribution system. We know that week 34 which was early August, we had downloads of about 47,000 packages from that system. So it just helps us with planning. This is the top 20 downloads. Office professional is right up there. Our printer locator is pretty popular. So that is just helpful for us to monitor what people want.

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