Eliminating IT

Status Go Podcast: Episode 1

“Of all of the leaders out there in all of our industries a full 85% don’t get beyond the self authoring stage.” – Ron West

Episode 40: Eliminating IT

We are thrilled to welcome Medallia SVP and CIO, Dr. Ashwin Ballal, to Status Go. In this episode Ashwin details how he is effectively eliminating IT, or at least IT as we currently know it, by taking the concept of customer experience and focusing it internally. Listen now as Ashwin discusses with Jeff Ton, SVP of Product Development and Strategic Alliances, just how he is introducing a new era of IT to his organization. You’ll hear about the bot they call Jarvis, which has taken over 35% of their tickets, proper brand building, employing empathy and how to measure success. In fact, Ashwin has taken his company’s own platform and built a tool for measuring the success of his team and himself as the CIO.

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Time Stamped Table of Contents

1:39 The era of new IT

4:09 Using bots for internal IT support

6:56 Ashwin’s background

9:29 A marketing perspective

11:40 The importance of building a brand

14:00 Empathy & IT leadership

15:47 Tracking and measuring success

22:51 Reputation management

27:31 Making changes based on feedback

29:16 Action items

Dr. Ashwin Ballal joined Medallia in 2016 as its first ever CIO. He is responsible for building best in class IT
infrastructure, collaboration services, workplace services and business systems that globally scale and provide a spectacular employee and systems experience. During his tenure at Medallia, Ashwin has been instrumental and responsible for Customer Experience – including several business transformational programs and projects that drive the top line growth and go-to market strategies and also includes building a very unique product solution for CxO’s.

Prior to joining Medallia, Ashwin was Chief Information, Intelligence & Data Officer at KLA-Tencor. Ashwin earned his doctorate and post doctorate degrees in Material Science and Engineering from the University of Maryland at College Park and his bachelor’s degree in Metallurgy from the National Institute of Technology in India.