Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let me synthesize, and then we’ll look at specific points that you’ve made. I’ve got an IT portal as a window into IT. I’ve got crowd sourced support, peer-to-peer support on the support side. I’ve got collaboration sessions to break down silos within IT, including storing and saving for reference. I’ve got mobility. Did I miss anything?

Markos Symeonides: I think you got most of it. The other element is something that we call the info zone, which is … I liken it to if you’re on Facebook, and you see the top right hand column. You’ll see that whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re looking at, they try to put relevant information, related information there on the same page. We’ve implemented this motion within the product as well.

For example, if a service desk technician is taking a call, instantly he or she will see on a panel with the profile of the user, with any existing requests or incidents that have been logged by the user. The technician will see similar things that have been logged and solved in the past. He or she can see anything that’s been scheduled to happen in the future that will impact this user. The technician will be able to tell if this user’s hardware, that is, devices, are under warranty and supported or not. The notion of this info zone there is quite important. And it’s from this zone that people can launch collaboration sessions and invite other users to participate.

SM: This IT portal you’re talking about, which is the window into everything else, is the expectation that the entire IT department is on this portal?

MS: Let me explain. This is a self-service portal for the business to access IT. All of the employees of a company, instead of phoning the help desk, will now log in to the portal and within that portal, be able to see all of the services that IT can provide, all the previous requests and things they’ve logged and the status, and they can see and track them like a FedEx tracker. They can see where things are happening. They can also solve their own problems by using the community there. They can look at the knowledge base. From within the portal, they can chat with IT to get their issues solved. There’s a message center there as well. That message center can integrate out to Yammer and things like that and other social media sites that the business uses internally. This portal is for the business. It’s their shop window into IT.

SM: I got it. Doesn’t this self-service portal, especially if it involves collaboration among various silos within IT on a particular topic, if all of that needs to actually work, doesn’t the IT department need to be available on this portal in a social media format, perhaps?

MS: Maybe I should have mentioned that IT has its own portal, if you like. It has its own web-based system to log in to and collaborate on.

SM: So, there are two portals. One is for the employees of the organization, who are the users of IT, essentially, the consumers of IT. For that, you have a self-service portal. And then you have another portal that is for the IT team or organization to use to collaborate among themselves. It’s not the same portal.

MS: It’s not the same portal, but the back end is basically same. But you’re correct. They’re different.

SM: When IT is a problem in some part of the business, there is the info zone, which helps in doing that?

MS: That’s correct. Then there’s a third one we call Assist Anywhere, which is again the same back end database, but designed for mobile devices and tablets. That can be accessed by employees or the IT team. When they log in, they’re going to see different things depending on who they are. If you’re an employee, you’ll be able to do 50% of things. If you’re IT, you can do 100%.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems
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