Managing Provisioning During Medallia’s Rapid Growth
The web is a noisy place and, despite the plethora of tools available to brands, it’s difficult for companies to solicit feedback on marketing promotions to create better messages. Okta customer Medallia was founded on a simple premise: empower companies to use the power of the Internet to deliver more meaningful messages to customers. That promise has evolved into outstanding customer service for brands like PayPal, Nordstrom and Delta Airlines and as a result, the company doubled in size both in 2014 and 2015. That rapid growth didn’t come without significant growing pains: the entire organization wrestled with adding and onboarding hundreds of new employees in a short period.
We recently caught up with Medallia’s Head of Corporate IT, Jonathan Hansen, to learn more about how Okta helped his team focus on making Medallia’s growth as efficient as possible.
Managing Identity at Scale
Jonathan joined Medallia in 2014 and admits existing processes were messy. Employees couldn’t remember all of their passwords to cloud apps and services and IT spent more than 20 hours a week figuring out what apps users should have access to. On top of that, the day-to-day tasks of managing password resets, frustrated users and the lack of a single source of truth for provisioning created both an internal and compliance headache for Jonathan. So he decided to make a change.
Jonathan audited different departments of Medallia to better understand where the biggest pain points were in IT processes and tools. As Medallia grew rapidly, adding hundreds of new employees over a few short months, Jonathan decided to start with HR and tackle identity management. At the time, HR recruiters would manage new hire information in a Google Doc that the IT team would have to use as a reference point to create new accounts for hires manually — a time consuming task. Jonathan knew he needed robust provisioning for a long list of applications used across the company, automated onboarding and offboarding through Workday, and multifactor authentication. After careful consideration, Medallia decided to expand their relationship with Okta (which they were already using for single sign-on).
Okta’s ability to integrate Active Directory and Workday for provisioning helped Jonathan’s team accelerate deployment. By being able to test provisioning options prior to launch and through counsel provided by Okta’s professional services team, Medallia was able to meet a two-month launch timeline. Today, Medallia utilizes Okta to automate the onboarding and offboarding process so that when a new employee starts they have access to all the tools they need to be successful.
Evolving IT’s Role In The Enterprise
Jonathan is enthusiastic about how Okta has impacted his team and Medallia:
“The exciting thing about the roll-out is, my team gets to stop doing provisioning and start pushing the company forward.”
In addition to the shift in focus, Medallia has experienced $800,000 annual savings from new IT, productivity and security efficiencies and a 90% reduction in password resets.
Okta’s impact didn’t stop with technical benefits. “My team used to not go to the company happy hour on Friday because we were deprovisioning accounts,” Jonathan explained. “Now we do.”
We’ll toast to that! Hear from Jonathan on how his team is continuing to drive innovation at Medallia with their in depth customer journey.