So at a high level, we all know that a CIO can add value to the way a company is run. We know that by managing the IT department and motivating the IT staff, the CIO can keep the email system and network running. However, that is not good enough. How can the CIO really transform the business? What does he/she have to do to make a difference? Turns out Ascend One knows the answer to this question…
Who are Ascend One and what do they do?
Ascend One is a company that works with consumers who have accumulated a lot of debt. As you can well imagine, a key part of the service they offer is the agents who speak to clients who are drowning in a sea of debt.
Ascend One had a problem. Their contact center and staff were a critical part of the business, as well as a major expense. In the year 2000, this part of the company occupied two buildings and was located near Baltimore, Maryland.
One of his biggest challenges was trying to keep the computers used by his 600 call center employees up to date. Every time there was an update to any of the software they used, it required the IT department to shut down and spend their time trying to push 600 software updates to the 600 workstations the staff used.
To further complicate matters, the workstations used by staff weren’t getting any younger: as software became more demanding, the end-of-life date for this expensive corporate asset drew ever closer. .
What did Ascend do?
Ascend One’s IT department knew they needed to do something and do it fast. What they decided to do was bite the bullet and create a virtual desktop environment for their call center staff to use. What this meant was that the old call center agent PCs would no longer be running their desktop applications, instead all the heavy lifting would be done on internal servers and only a browser would be needed to display the results on each PC.
The ultimate goal of this transformation was to allow customer service agents to stop worrying about upgrading their PCs and spend more time providing credit counseling to their customers. Centralized storage and management of all their applications on virtual desktops allowed them to do this.
What about security?
You may have guessed it already: A side benefit of desktop virtualization was that it meant Ascend One call center staff no longer HAD to go to a fixed location to get their work done. There was only one problem: how could they safely access the virtualization servers from their homes?
Ascend One, it turned out, didn’t want to have to send staff to each remote worker’s home to set up their bewildering array of different types of computers. Instead, what the Ascend One did was sit down with Dell and explain exactly what the minimum configuration they needed was, and then they created a disk image that allowed a computer to access their back office securely. Now every new call center employee is shipped a new Dell computer and it works right out of the box.
This has had the added benefit for Ascend One that they have been able to hire workers on the West Coast. This means that they can operate their call center for an additional three hours each day without having to work multiple shifts.
What all this means to you
In the end, each CIO is judged based on the value they have been able to bring to their company. Keeping things running isn’t enough – you need to do things that actually make the business run better.
The Ascend One IT Store has shown how to do this. They were challenged with their frontline staff spending too much time on IT work and not enough on working with customers. The IT department implemented a desktop virtualization solution and it has paid off.
As a CIO, you’ll need to be on the lookout for opportunities to add value to your business. It’s not always going to be the big CRM implementation projects that will advance your career, sometimes it can be as simple as finding something else to virtualize…
