Tuesday October 26, 2004

iWork, Data and the Survey

The JDS Preview Testing status review meeting is this afternoon. Assuming that I don't have to report for jury duty this afternoon I'll be there when we make the go/no go decision.

On the iWork front, we have just kicked off the annual iWork survey. Of course iWork is Sun's internal program to provide a work environment that supports the way people work. This is the seventh year we have done the survey. It allows us to understand employee satisfaction with iWork and how we can improve it. Anyone at Sun can look at the results and we can identify what factors are working and what needs improvement. It also allows us to review satisfaction by site and by job classification and then select initiatives that address any problem areas.

An example of improvements that have come out of the survey is printing. For several years the survey has said that people were unsatisfied with the ability to print when they were not in their anchor location. As a result this year we developed a tool called LPSelect. It is a graphical user interface tool that assists users in editing their Solaris printer configuration file ($HOME/.printers). This tool allows you to add an existing LDAP printer to your printer configuration file, change your default printer (no log out/in required), or add a printer not currently in the LDAP database. We are anxiously awaiting this years results to see if our printing score goes up.

Last year overall results suggested that employees who feel that they can exercise their personal choice tend to be significantly more satisfied and employees who use other iWork locations over a threshold level (at least 10% of the time) also tend to be significantly more satisfied. As a result of these findings we continue to build more choice into the program while still addressing managers concerns.

Another advantage of the survey that might not be self evident is how important it is to have data to prove the value of a program like iWork. Over the years there have been lots of skeptics about the value of iWork. Instead of having heated discussions about people's opinions of whether iWork works for Sun we are able to point to data about the program and its impact on Sun and on employees. Data is valuable.