CIO Perspective: Navigating the Safe Return of Employees to the Workplace.

Energy Company Cuts Costs While Achieving Employee Satisfaction and Productivity

Challenges

The IT service desk team at this financial technology (fintech) company used a public-facing IT channel on Slack as a means for employees to get help. This caused a strain on the service desk since agents had to constantly monitor the channel, negatively impacting MTTR and employee productivity. In addition, top use cases required agents to handle them, taking significant agent bandwidth for highly repetitive tasks. Also, while the company invested in building knowledge content in Confluence, they had no visibility into what content was working.

Solutions

By making Espressive Barista available via direct messages on Slack, the number of questions going to the public IT channel was dramatically reduced. Barista integrates with Slack as a native app, answering employee questions or creating tickets in Jira on their behalf. The company automated their top use cases, including one that required a custom integration between Barista and their CMDB, enabled by the Barista Control Center. Also, because Barista enables feedback at the end of every transaction, the service desk team can identify content gaps and required updates.

Results

With Barista integrated into Slack, employees save time by receiving immediate, personalized answers. And with fewer employees relying on the public IT channel, agents are able to focus on more strategic initiatives. Now Barista deflects over 3,300 tickets per month, including 500+ that are fully automated (e.g., VPN connection issues, password reset), significantly reducing MTTR.

With Barista integrated into Slack, employees save time by receiving immediate, personalized answers. And with fewer employees relying on the public IT channel, agents are able to focus on more strategic initiatives. Now Barista deflects over 3,300 tickets per month, including 500+ that are fully automated (e.g., VPN connection issues, password reset), significantly reducing MTTR.

Bringing Employees Back to the Workplace

The pandemic has abruptly impacted every facet of our lives. Six months after the work from home mandate hit in March 2020, enterprises were determining how to safely bring employees back to the physical workplace. Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive, interviewed Kumud Kalia, CIO of Guardant Health, to understand his views on navigating the safe return of employees to the workplace. Kumud provides an interesting perspective because they have essential workers who have had to be at work all along, while the majority of employees have worked from home.

In this eBook, you will gain perspective on:

• How Guardant is bringing employees back on site
• Best practices for creating a safe workplace
• Managing high growth during work from home
• Employee self-help as a social experience
• Answers customized for location-based policies
• Dealing with burnout and employee well being
• Providing the right tech stack and IT initiatives

Kumud Kalia has held technology, operations, and strategy leadership roles with high-tech, energy, telecommunications, and financial services companies and is now the Chief Information Officer at Guardant Health. He was most recently Chief Information and Technology Officer at Cylance, Inc., and previously served as CIO at Akamai Technologies. Kumud had received Computerworld's "best in class" recognition among its 100 Premier Information Technology (IT) leaders and has led teams that have won CIO100, CTO25, and other prestigious industry awards.