User Governance

Our user access is handled by SSO and administrative groups tied to our system in general, so once a person loses access to the university systems, they also lose access to Qualtrics. The question of their surveys is much harder! We tend to leave them alone unless others at the institution come asking for them, or the person leaving plans ahead and sends us a list of projects to transfer to someone else. 

From my perspective, this would be an amazing thing for Qualtrics to address for admins. I cannot see all surveys in my system anywhere. I have to know who owns it, what it is called, etc, in order to find a survey. This is very inefficient, especially in cases where the owner may not be the person who manages the survey administration. I would love a searchable list available to admins that shows me all surveys, their active status, last date of administration, and owner, at a minimum. If there is a report like this that became available at some point, someone fill me in!

​@heatherchapman same, our University uses SSO and IT manages the SSO access.  I personally have never had anyone come back after the fact, but I did recently have to transfer permissions from a student/GA that had left back to a professor.  Great point about a searchable list!

We also use SSO. That means that someone can't login to Qualtrics after they leave our institution. That does not delete their account, their surveys, or their survey data. That seems like a security risk to leave those unused accounts and survey data out there.   I manually download a list of users in Qualtrics and I get a list from IT of our active campus accounts. I compare the two lists. Anyone with a Qualtrics account that has not been access in 1 year and does not have an active campus account (they can’t use SSO to login): I delete their account. Once a semester I email all active accounts about our campus policy when accounts are deleted, reminders about how to check if a survey is shared with you and if you might need a survey transferred to your account because a colleague is leaving the institution, and how to download your data if you are planning to leave the institution. The thing I worry most about in my process is users using a survey that is shared with them and not realizing that they are not the owner. If I delete the account that owns the survey I could be deleting it for an active user that has a shared (collaborate) version of that survey.

Also good points ​@lwalker1 

Our access is also handled by SSO, so I’m not as concerned with terminating access to Qualtrics, but I agree 100% about the surveys left behind and the lack of visibility for admins. Every time I ask Qualtrics support about this, their answer is always “just proxy login to the user’s account to get the information you need.” I have 14k+ accounts in my brand (mainly because administration is such a manual process), so that’s not a viable option.

I’m working on trying to create an account retention policy similar to this. Let Qualtrics disable inactive accounts after 365 days, then delete the accounts after they’ve been disabled for 1 year. So hopefully by the time a user hasn’t logged in for 2 years, their account would be safe to delete. But I’m also concerned that I’ll delete an account with a “mission critical” survey.

We also use SSO, so access to accounts is disabled after someone leaves, but we don’t automatically delete the accounts themselves. As others have said, that could be an issue if there are active surveys or forms owned by someone who has left that are still being used by collaborators or groups. We get survey transfer requests pretty regularly, but not everyone realizes they need to make that request. They just add a co-worker or the next student research assistant as a collaborator before they leave the university and think that’s good enough.

Another consideration is data governance and data retention requirements, which could be from our IRB, our institution policies, a research grant, state or federal laws, or other groups, and look back periods can be several years. We don’t want to end up in a situation where someone comes looking for original response data that legally should have been retained but wasn’t, and the account has been deleted.

I would really like it if Qualtrics improved their administrative tools so I could more easily identify accounts with zero content or zero results, whether accounts or surveys have collaborators and who they are, the most recent response date for every survey, etc. It would also be amazing to be able to transfer surveys with ALL associated library assets, so we don't end up in situations where the surveys and workflows have been transferred, but there are dozens of library messages and embedded graphics that also have to be downloaded, recreated, and relinked before the original owner’s account can be deleted. :/

Same as the other comments, we rely on SSO to prevent access once someone leave the university.
Hoping to start deactivating accounts after 365 days of inactivity. Same concerns about deleting mission critical surveys if a user account is deleted, so we don’t.

Reporting for admins is sadly lacking. No easy way to do any kind of robust reporting that could help Brands actually implement administrative oversight (e.g. all users with no surveys, all users with surveys that haven’t been shared, all active surveys that haven’t received responses in X days/months/years, etc.)