Client Overview

When Francis Calata joined the data analytics company Earnest Research, their current structure had opportunities for improvement. With a company of over 100 employees and over 150 devices, the two person Corporate IT team was hindered from making strategic improvements as it faced daily support challenges. “We realized 80% of our team’s focus was on IT Support and 20% on process improvements and policy creation. Attempting to take the function to the next level was challenging because we were firefighting all the time.”

As these daily challenges progressed, the team had less time to focus on other IT areas (i.e. improving vendor relationships, cost saving initiatives and use case validation for active applications). For example, they had contracts, subscriptions and equipment that were active but beyond their expected life cycle. This resulted in increased costs and lower satisfaction ratings.

In an effort to improve Corporate IT’s value to the organization, Francis and Ethan knew that one of their primary goals was to create bandwidth for the team. Initially, Earnest utilized an outsourced provider, which only provided IT support. However, they lacked the visibility to present the health of their IT environment or the future needs of their users. “We couldn’t solidify our IT strategy because we lacked the insight and feedback as to the root of our employees’ issues or requests”.There was no way to understand areas to automate nor a path for future preventative measures.

With Electric’s IT request reporting along with their varied time zone support (benefiting their European employees), Earnest decided to turn to Electric as their partner. Upon contract execution, Electric took on all IT support for all Earnest employees, giving them access to a team of 100+ IT experts who were a Slack message away with an initial response time of 10 minutes or less. While Francis and Ethan no longer had to manage initial requests, they maintained valuable insights from Electric’s Turbine dashboard. With Turbine, they could easily view requests, organized by request time and the ability to drill into individual requests for details. With additional bandwidth and valuable insights to all the requests, Ethan and Francis worked with the rest of the business to optimize their IT processes.

In addition to IT support, Electric took onboarding, offboarding, network management off their plates resulting in more bandwidth for the team. Electric took on everything from application provisioning to device procurement, bringing down their involvement from several hours to mere minutes. “With Electric’s ability to provide IT support to their employees, Ethan was able to divert 75-80% of his time to project oriented initiatives, delivering further value as a team”.

Overall, this created the ability for the team to focus on other strategic areas that needed improvement such as Security, Asset Management and Vendor negotiations. “Where we normally put 20% of our time into strategy and 80% into daily firefighting, Electric allowed us to reverse these percentages thus focusing that 80% on strategy and 20% on daily operations.” This transition resulted in successful career growth opportunities for both Ethan and Francis. “Electric allowed us to shift focus away from support and towards innovation, optimization and automation.”