hr-survey.com

Survey Questions: Information Technology

Organization Skills
Department
Human Resources
Information Technology/IT
Technology Use/Management
Business Focus
Corporate Culture
Company
Global Perspective
Reorganization
Hiring
Staffing
Turnover
Diversity
Facilities
Resources
Equality
Employee Assistance Program
Employee Development
Employee Relations
Pay
Benefits
Rewards/Recognition
Wellness Program
Questionnaires measuring the IT Department:
Example 1 (5-point scale; numbers; NA)
Example 2 (7-point scale; radio buttons)
Example 3 (4-point scale; radio buttons)
Example 4 (5-point scale; radio buttons)
Example 5 (5-point scale; words)
Example 6 (Pulse Survey)
Example 7 (5-point scale; item comments)
Example 8 (3-point scale; words; N/A)
Example 9 (4-point scale; numbers)
Example 10 (Comment boxes only)
Example 11 (Single rating per dimension)
Example 12 (Slide-bar scale)
Definition: Information Technology is the organizational capability that designs, operates, and improves the technical ecosystem by applying core technical competencies, secure engineering practices, analytical problem‑solving, and disciplined data and systems management. It delivers service‑oriented, customer‑focused support through clear communication, effective triage and resolution, strong knowledge‑transfer practices, and well‑maintained service‑desk operations that ensure users receive timely, high‑quality assistance. It ensures that technology decisions, architectures, resources, acquisitions, vendor relationships, and risk‑management activities are strategically aligned with organizational priorities, governance requirements, and long‑term business outcomes. It maintains operational excellence through robust controls, data governance, integration and modeling discipline, continuous improvement, trend and issue analysis, and technical leadership that guides teams toward scalable, compliant, and future‑ready solutions.


Core Technical Competencies
Core Technical Competencies focus on the engineering craft and technical mastery required to build, maintain, and improve IT systems. This includes deep knowledge of software, equipment, system dependencies, and architectural patterns; the ability to write clean, secure, well-structured code; skill in designing data structures and integrations; and proficiency in testing, documentation, and reliable system design. These behaviors describe the technical precision, engineering judgment, and hands-on capability that enable IT teams to create scalable, maintainable, and high-quality technology solutions.


Service Orientation
Service Orientation focuses on how IT delivers technology as a service to the organization. It emphasizes responsiveness, reliability, workflow design, operational efficiency, and cross-team collaboration. This includes maintaining equipment effectively, responding quickly to user needs, improving IT workflows, automating processes, and ensuring that IT services consistently support organizational goals. These behaviors describe the operational excellence, service quality, and partnership mindset that ensure technology functions smoothly and enables productivity across the business.


Knowledge Transfer
Knowledge Transfer is about people-to-people learning, ensuring that skills, judgment, context, and operational understanding move from experienced staff to others so the organization becomes more capable over time. It emphasizes mentoring, walkthroughs of complex incidents, onboarding pathways, cross-team learning sessions, reusable playbooks, and practices that help individuals understand not just what to do, but why and how to do it independently. This dimension is fundamentally about building capability, reducing dependency on single experts, and strengthening organizational learning. It focuses on behaviors that create shared understanding, improve decision-making, and help teams work smarter and more autonomously.


Strategic Alignment
Strategic Alignment focuses on how IT leaders ensure that technology decisions, architectures, and investments directly advance organizational goals, key initiatives, and long-term priorities. It emphasizes evaluating operational strategies, shaping enterprise architecture roadmaps, and deploying technology in ways that maximize business value and strengthen core objectives. The behaviors in this dimension (such as assessing departmental strategies, guiding modernization efforts, aligning systems with governance requirements, and ensuring initiatives can be implemented effectively) reflect a forward-looking, value-driven mindset.


IT Resources
IT Resources describes how an organization strategically deploys its technology assets (people, systems, infrastructure, and capacity) to maximize operational impact and support changing business priorities. The emphasis is on alignment, adaptability, and value optimization. Statements such as anticipating changing needs, adjusting resources to match evolving requirements, and ensuring that IT capabilities are positioned to support organizational demands all point to a competency centered on resource stewardship and strategic enablement. In this dimension, an employee demonstrates strength by ensuring that IT systems, staffing, and investments are continually evaluated, realigned, and leveraged to deliver the strongest return on effort and investment.


IT Controls
IT Controls focuses on the governance, oversight, and assurance mechanisms that keep systems secure, compliant, stable, and auditable. This dimension emphasizes designing, operating, and evaluating the controls that reduce risk and ensure predictable system behavior. Activities such as reviewing access permissions, validating backups, monitoring logs, documenting change procedures, and collaborating with audit and compliance teams all reflect a disciplined approach to risk mitigation and control effectiveness. IT Controls is about ensuring that systems operate within defined guardrails and that deviations, failures, or risks are detected and addressed through structured, evidence-based processes.


Risk Management
Risk Management focuses on identifying, evaluating, mitigating, and monitoring risks that could disrupt operations, weaken controls, or expose the organization to vulnerabilities. It emphasizes structured risk assessment practices, maintaining risk registers, validating mitigation actions, conducting severity assessments, and proactively identifying emerging risks in system architectures and integrations. The behaviors in this dimension (such as using standardized checklists, collaborating with security and compliance teams, reviewing proposed changes for risk impact, and implementing ongoing monitoring) reflect a discipline centered on resilience, stability, and exposure reduction.


Vendor Review
Vendor Review focuses on the ongoing oversight, performance management, and risk monitoring of third-party providers after they are already engaged with the organization. It emphasizes routine vendor briefings, onboarding processes, performance-review meetings, compliance checks, and continuous evaluation of vendor-related risks. This competency is fundamentally about relationship governance and operational assurance--ensuring that vendors deliver reliably, meet expectations, comply with standards, and maintain security and operational integrity over time.


Acquisition Evaluation and Acceptance
Acquisition Evaluation and Acceptance focuses on the front-end assessment, testing, and approval of new software or technology solutions before they are adopted. It emphasizes evaluating vendor capabilities, analyzing total cost of ownership, validating architectural fit, defining acceptance criteria, conducting structured testing, documenting defects, coordinating remediation, and ensuring that proposed solutions meet business, technical, security, and compliance requirements. This competency is fundamentally about pre-deployment rigor and decision quality--ensuring that what the organization acquires is mature, secure, fit-for-purpose, and ready for operational use.


Data Model
Data Model focuses on how an organization defines, structures, and governs the meaning and relationships of its data so systems remain coherent, interoperable, and aligned with business needs. It emphasizes standardizing definitions and schemas, translating business processes into data entities and flows, maintaining versioned documentation, and ensuring that proposed system changes preserve the integrity of the underlying model. This competency is fundamentally about architectural clarity, semantic consistency, and stakeholder alignment--making sure everyone agrees on what the data represents, how it should be organized, and how it supports operational and strategic goals.


Data Controls
Data Controls focuses on the technical safeguards, enforcement mechanisms, and monitoring processes that protect data and ensure it is handled in compliance with governance and regulatory requirements. It emphasizes access controls, authentication, encryption, retention and disposal mechanisms, backup and recovery validation, and monitoring workflows for policy violations. This competency is fundamentally about risk reduction, protection, and operational assurance--ensuring that data is secure, properly governed, and processed according to defined standards.


Data Governance
Data Governance focuses on the policies, roles, and operating structures that define how data is owned, classified, protected, and managed across the organization. It emphasizes establishing stewardship roles, clarifying data sources and flows, mapping how data supports business processes, and ensuring that data is handled according to organizational and regulatory requirements. This dimension is fundamentally about accountability, policy enforcement, and organizational clarity--creating the rules, responsibilities, and operating model that guide how data should be managed throughout its lifecycle.


Data Integration
Data Integration focuses on the technical execution of combining, harmonizing, and moving data across systems so applications, analytics, and business processes have consistent, high-quality information. It emphasizes integrating data from multiple sources, defining integration architectures and standards, troubleshooting complex data flows, and consolidating information to support enterprise insights. This dimension is fundamentally about engineering reliability, interoperability, and technical enablement--ensuring that data from diverse platforms can be unified and used effectively for operational and strategic decision-making.


Analytical and Problem Solving
Analytical and Problem Solving focuses on diagnosing and resolving individual technical issues, improving system performance, and translating business needs into actionable technical solutions. It emphasizes analyzing system behavior, improving scalability and efficiency, applying SDLC or Agile practices, collaborating across technical teams, and identifying risks early in the design-to-deployment lifecycle. This competency is fundamentally about technical reasoning, solution design, and incident resolution--the ability to break down complex problems, determine the right fix, and implement improvements that strengthen system performance and operational outcomes.


Technical Leadership Competency
Technical Leadership Competency focuses on setting direction, establishing standards, and building the technical capability of the organization. It emphasizes defining architectures, coding standards, and best practices; evaluating tools and platforms for long-term value; designing IT policies and processes; breaking work into manageable increments; and ensuring development practices align with security, governance, and regulatory requirements. This competency is fundamentally about technical stewardship and organizational guidance--leading teams, shaping the technical environment, and making strategic decisions that strengthen departmental performance.


Innovation and Continuous Improvement
Innovation and Continuous Improvement focuses on identifying opportunities to enhance systems, processes, and practices over time. It emphasizes staying current with industry trends, proposing workflow or architectural improvements, incorporating user feedback, evaluating new tools for potential adoption, reducing incident volume, improving stability, and contributing to post-incident action items. This competency is fundamentally about evolution, experimentation, and iterative enhancement--spotting inefficiencies, advocating for change, and driving improvements that increase reliability, usability, and performance.


Issues and Trends Analysis
Issues and Trends Analysis focuses on pattern recognition, systemic insight, and long-term problem prevention. It emphasizes recording incidents accurately, ensuring traceability, conducting structured root-cause analysis, identifying recurring patterns, validating findings with experts, and monitoring logs and metrics for anomalies. This competency is fundamentally about detecting underlying issues, distinguishing symptoms from true causes, and identifying trends that signal deeper systemic problems.


Troubleshoot/Triage/Prioritize
Troubleshoot/Triage/Prioritize focuses on the initial response, diagnostic reasoning, and rapid stabilization of technical issues. It emphasizes gathering logs and error details, assessing severity and business impact, applying structured troubleshooting methods, providing temporary workarounds, narrowing down likely causes, and routing incidents to the correct resolver group. This competency is fundamentally about speed, clarity, and decision-making under pressure--ensuring that incidents are understood, contained, and escalated appropriately so service disruption is minimized.


Resolution and Closure
Resolution and Closure focuses on finishing the work thoroughly, validating outcomes, and ensuring long-term stability once the root cause is known. It emphasizes applying known solutions, confirming service restoration with users, replacing temporary workarounds with permanent fixes, validating that dependent systems function correctly, documenting resolution steps clearly, and ensuring no follow-up actions remain outstanding before closing the ticket. This competency is fundamentally about completeness, accuracy, and accountability--making sure issues are fully resolved, well-documented, and prevented from recurring.


Knowledgebase Contributions
Knowledgebase Contributions is about content-to-repository learning, ensuring that accurate, structured, and accessible documentation exists for others to reference. It emphasizes updating troubleshooting guides, documenting known errors, flagging outdated content, capturing lessons learned, identifying documentation gaps, and improving runbooks and support materials. This dimension is fundamentally about maintaining a reliable, up-to-date knowledge repository that supports consistent service delivery and reduces repeated effort. It focuses on behaviors that improve clarity, accuracy, and completeness of written knowledge so teams can quickly find solutions and maintain operational continuity.


Clear and Timely Communication
Clear and Timely Communication focuses on how effectively IT professionals convey information, updates, and technical details to others, especially across teams and to non-technical audiences. It emphasizes keeping departments informed about system changes, documenting actions and symptoms, providing status updates, ensuring accurate shift handoffs, and communicating incident details clearly to technical teams. This competency is fundamentally about information flow, clarity, and responsiveness--making sure the right people receive the right information at the right time, in a way they can understand and act on.


Customer Focused Support
Customer Focused Support centers on the quality of the user experience, emphasizing empathy, responsiveness, clarity, and long-term problem ownership. It focuses on listening attentively to understand user context, responding quickly when issues arise, setting realistic expectations, providing courteous and professional assistance, and tracking tickets through to permanent resolution. This competency reflects a mindset of advocacy and care--ensuring users feel supported, informed, and confident that IT is committed to solving their problems. It also includes recommending long-term fixes or process improvements and coordinating with technical teams to prioritize remediation efforts.


Service Desk
Service Desk focuses on the operational execution of Tier 1 support functions, emphasizing accuracy, consistency, workflow adherence, and efficient processing of standard requests. It includes quickly fulfilling routine tasks (like software installs or access provisioning), escalating issues appropriately, following defined approval processes, and ensuring complete and accurate handoffs to higher-tier teams. This competency reflects a mindset of process discipline and operational reliability--ensuring that requests are handled correctly, escalations are timely, and all procedural steps are followed.


Expertise
Expertise focuses on credibility, trust, and the depth of professional relationships IT leaders build across the organization. It emphasizes being approachable for technical problems, establishing strong partnerships with senior leadership, supporting enterprise priorities, and maintaining high-trust relationships that enable IT to influence strategy. This competency is fundamentally about professional authority, relational strength, and organizational impact--demonstrating the knowledge, judgment, and leadership presence that make others confident in IT's guidance.