CIO Perspective: The Impact of COVID-19 and What’s Next

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.

CIO Perspective: The Impact of COVID-19 and What’s Next

On April 2, just two weeks after the shelter in place order went into effect in California, Pat Calhoun, founder and CEO of Espressive, interviewed Declan Morris, former CIO of Splunk, to understand his views on how CIO's are responding to COVID-19. This eBook summarizes Pat's interview with Declan.

The interview covers a range of topics including:

• Initial impact of COVID-19 work from home mandates
• Options enterprises have to mitigate the impact
• Considerations when provisioning automation
• Importance of employee adoption to the CIO
• Should IT leaders reprioritize their portfolios
• Comparison of recessions in 2008 and 2020
• Getting the attention of the IT leadership team
• Budget is tight; how do you prioritize it

Declan is Executive in Residence for Costanoa Ventures where he advises infrastructure companies on product market fit. Prior to that, Declan served as Chief Information Office for Splunk were he led the IT organization through an intensive hyper-growth period that saw revenues soar tenfold. Declan has also served in various IT leadership positions at Adobe, eBay, PayPal, Goldman Sachs, and Charles Schwab & Co.