Medallia

Jonathan Hansen:  I'm Jonathan Hansen, Head of IT for Medallia. We help companies understand what their customers like and don't like about them, so they keep doing the good stuff and stop doing the bad stuff. So, my vision of IT has always been a little off kilter from the traditional. I think the industry is finally catching up with the idea that IT people shouldn't be doing rote tasks. You've got intelligent, well-trained, creative people that know what's going on in a company and they're doing data entry to create user accounts. They're doing reset your computer and it's just a waste of talent.

My vision has always been the IT team automates their job and gets rid of all those things. Makes the computers do those things. A computer is really good at rote tasks, at copying information. It doesn't make mistakes, usually. Humans do. We're gonna equip people with whatever technology is gonna make them the most productive, whether that's the IT staff, from automating their work, or the sales guys and making sure they have the information they need as soon as they need it. The reason it's called information technology is you gotta get the information into the right hands as quickly as possible.

When I arrived at Medallia, we already had Okta but it was implemented as basically password storage. It was just the SWA. You click on the button, you put in your login. Then I built up my team a little bit. We had an initiative to implement all of the provisioning, de-provisioning, Workday as a master, and basically started really using the product. Workday is a HR system and the way Medallia uses it is recruiters put the information in, then HR double checks. They do their work uploading documents and saying, "Yeah, the person passed their background check," and then what used to happen is everything would go to IT and we'd have to create all the accounts. Now, what happens is IT does something else and Okta creates all the accounts.

The partnership with Okta has been really good. We use the professional services for our Workday rollout. We had a lot going on during that team. We were replacing our active directory server, properly implementing Okta and rolling out Workday all out the same time and in a fairly short time span. We had about two months to do it, to meet HR's deadline on Workday. So, having the Okta support and helping us through that and their knowledge of what we were going to run into was critical.

On the user side, the top features are just the usability. The fact that you have one place to go and everything you have is there. People have a hard time remembering all the fancy URLs. Is it medallia.zendesk.com, zendesk.medallia.com? Where do I go? With Okta, it's just the button. On the IT side, the main benefit is the provisioning and de-provisioning. My team used to not go to the company happy hour on Friday because we were de-provisioning accounts. Now, we do.