Quantifying the Value of Technology Investments for Nonprofits

John Wilke: Good morning. This is John Wilke with Okta and welcome to Quantifying the Value of Technology Investments for Nonprofits. How do you measure the value of a technology solution in your organization? And then more importantly or just as importantly, how do you communicate that value to other stakeholders?

John Wilke: In today's session, we've got a couple of experts both from Okta as well as some Okta customers. We're going to kick off the session with an introduction just on how and why Okta has developed a nonprofit-focused approach to calculate business value, then you'll hear a couple of customer examples and we've got a leader from one of those customers at Achievement First just to talk through what they learned from performing the analysis within their own organization. And then once you understand the methodology, at the end, we'll share some practical advice on how to communicate the results to your colleagues, funders, and other stakeholders at your organization.

John Wilke: Before we dive in, we just want to quickly touch on the Safe Harbor. Okta's a publicly traded company. We are going to talk through a couple of customer examples. Don't make any business decisions or anything based on anything that we discussed today. I think you guys have probably seen the Safe Harbor statements before.

John Wilke: Let's go ahead and just quickly run down the agenda. We're going to start with some speaker introductions and just some quick housekeeping on the format of today's presentation. Then we'll talk through just a high-level introduction to how Okta thinks about value and demonstrating that value for customers.

John Wilke: We'll quickly touch on the first nonprofit value story that we have with Norwegian Refugee Council. We'll then have a nice discussion around Achievement First and the value that they achieved with Okta and then finally, we'll talk through just some next steps, ways that you can get involved, where we're headed with the program.

John Wilke: We've got three speakers today on our panel as part of the presentation. Marques, do you want to go ahead?

Marques Stewart: Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Marques Stewart, senior director for Achievement First, which is a charter management organization of about 37 schools in the Northeast Region serving about a population of 15,000 students.

John Wilke: Perfect. Thanks, Marques. As I said at the top of the slides, my name is John Wilke. I'm a senior product marketing manager with Okta based in the San Francisco office. I'm pretty focused just on the value solution from a product marketing perspective and actually was part of the business value team at Okta prior to joining the product marketing team.

Marissa Monaco: I'm Marissa Monaco. I'm a senior customer success manager here at Okta, been with Okta for over three years now, and ultimately, my role is to make sure our customers are successful in leveraging Okta.

Marissa Monaco: I'm also part of the Okta for Good product impact team as a strategy lead. So I'm working to get a better understanding of how we can best support our nonprofit customers.

Marissa Monaco: Before we head into the next slide, I do want to call out that this session is prerecorded. There will be no Q&A at the end but we do ask that you use the time in the chat during the session to engage in the Q&A as Marques, myself, and John will all be online and available to answer questions.

Marissa Monaco: Our original vision for the session was that this would be interactive and you would be engaging with the business value assessment in providing real time feedback in person. But as we pivot here with this approach, we're still hopeful and know that you guys will all engage in the chat and provide feedback after and we hope that you stick around till the end for a call to action of how you can further engage with this assessment and we can really continue to gear this towards our nonprofit audience.

John Wilke: Perfect. Thanks, Marissa. Before we dive into some really powerful, real life, real world examples, when we talk about value, I think it's helpful just to set the stage a little bit around what that means. It means different things to different people. We've already heard the term business value or organizational value. Let's actually talk through where we're coming from in our perspective on value and demonstrating that value with Okta.

John Wilke: As I mentioned before joining product marketing for about a year and a half, I was on Okta's business value team. This team is about four or five years old. It was really designed and intended to work with Okta customers pre and post sales just to be able to figure out, "Where are we strategically aligned? What's on the roadmap? What is top of mind for our customers? And then how does Okta as a solution fit into that roadmap?" This is something that I think a lot of IT leaders work through and think about as they deploy different technology solutions, different SaaS solutions.

John Wilke: This team is really just designed to do a lot of that heavy lifting and actually, for our customers or prospective customers, be able to quantify both dollars saved, time saved, things like that for our customers to help them achieve those goals.

John Wilke: Typically, when the business value team was engaged, historically, it was primarily on pre sales or what we refer to as the value discovery phase but as Okta has grown, as we've continued to add more customers, work with different industries, different organizations, the business value team has become more and more important and our customers have found more value from it, no pun intended.

John Wilke: Because throughout training, deployment, adoption, eventually renewal, it really provides a way to just keep that conversation going and track and benchmark, "Are we achieving our goals? Is Okta empowering us as new solutions come out as use cases and organizational focuses change? Where can we figure out some white space to make sure that we're not only achieving value with what we currently have, but we can figure out an investment and a new solution or new direction will provide what return on that investment."

John Wilke: This slide is our $5 slide just quickly highlighting what are the top reasons to even go through a value exercise. Why does an IT leader see like this is something that's worth their time and worth focusing on? They're really four big reasons that I think we've touched on a little bit already, but the big one is just understanding for current customers that historical value.

John Wilke: We actually come in and measure, and we'll talk through with a couple of customer examples. You can basically get a win and say, "Hey, we're spending this money on Okta as a solution. Here's what we're getting for that investment. This is the historical value."

John Wilke: But as another part of the process, we actually identify areas where there's unrealized value. Maybe you have a partial deployment, maybe you have a hybrid legacy deployment that a lot of organizations that we work with are still using where they have some apps set up for provisioning with Okta but maybe not all of their apps. We can say, "Hey, if you were to spend a little bit more time in setting up that provisioning for all apps. Here's that value incrementally that you would achieve which plays in really well into future alignment."

John Wilke: There's understanding having that conversation with both Okta and with the organization talking about what are you focused on? What are your future priorities which really aligns with again, those core program initiatives, priorities? What's going to matter to the executive board? What's going to matter to the funders that you have?

John Wilke: These are the four big reasons and four, I guess, pillars of a value exercise. Then folding up under all four of these are three areas that we focus on and actually quantify. The first one being just decreasing cost and increasing efficiency. Really being able to do more with less for most nonprofits or budgets and there's usually not much flexibility. How do we make sure that we're optimizing those dollars with every technology investment?

John Wilke: The other quantifiable bucket is the acceleration of organization growth. Adding users, being able to roll out new applications without having to add more IT professionals, and then finally just securing the future and the organization. We can actually quantify, and we'll talk through a couple of examples with Achievement First, where we can actually see based on understanding security metrics, understanding who's logging in from where, there's value within that and being able to demonstrate that to other leaders that maybe aren't quite as technical is huge. If you can say, "Hey, the avoided cost of a breach is saving us however many thousands of dollars per year," then that can be very powerful.

John Wilke: So then going through the exercise that's on the front end, why it makes sense to go through it but ultimately, on the back end, this is what we see and what we hear from customers that have gone through the value exercise. Basically, it just gives them a win.

John Wilke: For me coming in and working at Okta every day, I love hearing those high five in the hallway stories from customers where they said, "Hey, after going through the value exercise, we're able to share it with the steering committee, with leadership. It let us know that we were on the same page, it helps us prioritize our spending for the upcoming years, we're reforming our budget, and really just help make sure that there's that clear business alignment."

John Wilke: Basically, the goal of this presentation, what we're talking through today, is just a highlight for you guys. As you're thinking about different solutions and different problems, teams like Okta's business value team are here as a resource to really just help your job run a little bit smoother and for, again, you just to get that win in your organization.

John Wilke: Our first example is with Norwegian Refugee Council. We were actually hoping that Mads who is a big partner of ours and big Okta advocate would be able to join us. Unfortunately, with the format, he was not able to speak. In a much less eloquent and less entertaining way, I'm going to try to speak to in just one slide what he would be covering on the value with NRC and Okta.

John Wilke: Basically, Norwegian Refugee Council, if you're not familiar with their work, please check them out, they do some incredible work all over the world. They've got a very spread out mobile workforce, oftentimes working in very remote areas that don't necessarily have IT or technology infrastructure in place. So their challenge was to be able to efficiently deploy and scale a strong and secure zero trust technology and identity platform that can support a growing in mobile workforce.

John Wilke: They had traditionally a legacy solution or technology stack like a lot of organizations do. But they were really focused on that journey to the cloud, understanding that that was the future and that was really the only way they could do the great work that they do around the world. After NRC was a customer for a couple of years, we actually had... It was back in fall of 2019 and they were starting to think about next steps, reevaluating, "What is our goal? What is our technology roadmap?"

John Wilke: We actually came in and they were one of the first guinea pig, nonprofit organizations that went through this new value for nonprofits analysis using the version one of the tool to actually quantify, "What are our IT cost savings with single sign on? What are we able to actually save by retiring a legacy VPN? How much time are we saving with automated provisioning and deprovisioning with Okta's Lifecycle Management solution?"

John Wilke: To be able to actually come in with these guys and quantify, "Based on what you've accomplished so far 120,000 in savings, 300,000 in savings, 6000 hours a year that they're saving." If you think about, that's basically equivalent to three people's time, full time, that they were able to save. That's extremely powerful.

John Wilke: NRC is a really cool story because they have actually transitioned completely off of active directory and are now completely... All their identity, all of their users are now stored in Okta's Universal Directory which is sometimes the case with some of our customers but not always. To be able to see them be able to grow, be able to continue to roll out new phases, and continue to be successful with Okta has been really cool.

John Wilke: That's just a quick, high level overview on that story. We actually have a more in depth, really cool video. There's a presentation at the URL on the bottom right hand side of this slide. Let me get back.

John Wilke: If you actually go to Okta's website or just Google Okta and NRC, I highly encourage you, go over and check out that story. The video is amazing. The story is really impressive there. That's just a quick, high level view of it. But I definitely encourage you guys to spend some time, read through that success story with Okta and NRC.

John Wilke: That's our first example today with NRC. Our next example with an Okta customer is with Achievement First. I'm super excited about this section. We have Marques who is joining us to talk through this process. I had the pleasure of working with Marques on the value assessment. So I'm really looking forward to talking through this.

Marques Stewart: Yeah, looking forward to it too, John.

John Wilke: Perfect, perfect. Let's dive in, Marques. Maybe just give folks a little bit of a background. I know we talked about what we're trying to measure, what the desired outcome is of the process. But you mind just giving a little bit of context and background on the process that we went through, how much time it took, things like that.

Marques Stewart: Yeah. Before I jump into that, just to give a little further background on how long we have been using Okta, Achievement First has been Okta customers for at least four to five years at this point. I am the one who was responsible for setting it up initially.

Marques Stewart: In that particular case, we were trying to solve for one particular thing which was our staff was informing us that they were tired of having to remember 20 different passwords to 20 different platforms. We went looking for a solution and saw that Okta was the best in breed in terms for us specifically single sign on. So that was five years ago.

Marques Stewart: And then I think in the fall, John and Adam from Okta for Good reached out to me asking about would I be interested in going through a business value assessment to really put numbers behind our actual usage of Okta. It was before the BVA. It was more like we feel that this is adding value to our company. People feel better about interacting with this instead of... They have to remember one password instead of all the other things.

Marques Stewart: But what the BVA really reveal to us is the fundamental change that took place and the fundamental things that we were able to accomplish once we actually took a step back and looked at all the things that have now been possible with us leveraging Okta.

Marques Stewart: The time it took to go through the BVA was roughly about 30 minutes. Thankfully for me since I have been using Okta for so long and have a good understanding how organization works I can say it probably could have taken me a little bit longer if I was just trying to search for that information. But it was a lot of stuff that I knew or could easily get access to just for some baseline information for the things that my team controlled.

John Wilke: Great, perfect. We've got a couple of steps here. It basically consists of... I think we sent over the... First, we had the kickoff call. I sent over questionnaire that we're able to get that data pretty easily then we basically take the results of that questionnaire talking about before Okta, how many password resets do we have? After Okta, how many password resets? That's a very simple example but just some general data points to get an idea of that before and after deployment perspective.

John Wilke: And then I think we had a couple of working sessions. Marques was kind enough to actually help us. I guess this is the second organization that has gone through this new process. You gave us some really great feedback. We had a couple of discussions around.

John Wilke: One thing I think we talked about was just how you had measured value in the past and how you would go to leadership and say, "Hey, this is why we need this new solution." Do you mind just talking through prior to the business value exercise and how in the past you would quantify for any solution or any problem? What value you're getting from it?

Marques Stewart: Yeah. The primary thing that we would use to convince people is, I hinted at before, the feeling. People feel that this thing is adding... It's not cumbersome. It's not getting in the way of them being able to accomplish something. It's at least easing a process that they have pain with and then it is in the grand scheme of things supercharging something that they want to do, but it was very much like do you feel this way or that way.

Marques Stewart: With the BVA, we can actually put numbers behind it even if it's with a nonprofit. Like you said, the budget is a budget. But usually the most important resource that nonprofit has are their people, people who are dedicated to their mission, people who understand the desires and goals of the company, and nonprofit cannot easily go out there and lay down 120K for somebody to come in and do some stuff.

Marques Stewart: You're really going for people who are really invested in your organization but those people are not infinite so you want to make sure that you are utilizing as much as possible the time and the skillset of those folks and anything that you can take off their plate and automate or systematize just allows them to do better and greater things for their nonprofit that a machine or AI can't do that only a human can do.

John Wilke: Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. Let's talk through how we actually quantify the business value assessment as opposed to knowing or having that gut feeling or a couple of anecdotal examples. Again, the business value team a couple years ago actually sat down. We've since iterated on this model but we sat down with Forrester Research and basically conducted this big survey to say, "What is the solution Okta provide in terms of value? What are the different categories? What are the different metrics?"

John Wilke: As a result of that survey, we identified three big value driver buckets. This is how we think about value achieved for any customer and even with the Achievement First example that we'll talk through. We really think about three areas. The first being decreasing IT costs.

John Wilke: To Marques' point, you only have finite resources typically so how do you do more with less in IT? How do you avoid certain dollar for dollar savings? Are there LDAP servers? Is there a VPN? Is there some solution that you can potentially sunset with a new solution like Okta? This one is really powerful because it is helping you figure out, "What makes sense based on budget? Where can we get those savings? Where can we scale with the team that we have?"

John Wilke: The second bucket is increasing productivity. We think of this both for the IT department but primarily for those end users. There's really passionate, powerful people that are focused on the mission whether they're teachers, volunteers, whoever you have as an end user making sure that they're as productive as possible so they aren't getting locked out of applications.

John Wilke: They don't have a confusing multifactor authentication experience. If you have a volunteer that maybe isn't quite as tech savvy, they need to be able to come in and quickly login, authenticate in a secure and easy to use away. So we can actually measure, "What are the hours that we're either regaining or allowing users to be more productive if they're able to log in from home, for example, as opposed to needing to be on prem?"

John Wilke: And then finally, we've spoken to this before, but just that increased visibility from a security perspective. Lowering your attack surface overall. The 20 different passwords that you mentioned, Marques, when I hear stuff like that, that makes me think that folks are reusing passwords which we know is less secure. We can have everyone just have one secure password attached to multifactor authentication then suddenly, you've greatly reduced the chance of a breach, stolen password, things like that in your organization.

John Wilke: That's the methodology that we use. Let's look at how this played out for Achievement First. This slide here, there's basically across all those different value driver buckets. There are a lot of different metrics and savings that we were able to identify but we wanted to call out just a couple of highlighted value drivers that have been realized. You can see they're still bucketed by reduced IT cost. Increased productivity, secured environment.

John Wilke: But this slide is pretty powerful because this basically is showing if you're saving 10,000 hours with provisioning and that's huge close to 10,000 hours, and we try to usually look at the top end so where we've got a really big, and then some of the lower bound. Maybe where you have some partially realized savings partially realized soft benefits. Maybe we've got a little bit smaller in terms of hours, in terms of value achieved. But maybe there's some of that potential future value to be unlocked.

John Wilke: A couple of things that we'll call out on this slide as well just the growth in users. I think Achievement First has gone from 2300 to 2500-ish users since the point Okta. I understand that you guys have been able to obviously provision users in an automated way as opposed to manual, freeing up some time. You've added more applications.

John Wilke: Marques, let's actually maybe dig into that one a little bit. Just talk about the number of applications that you guys have rolled out from a cloud perspective and just talk us through how Okta has been able to achieve some of these metrics that we have here.

Marques Stewart: Yeah. When we first brought Okta into the equation, we really wanted to focus on... Because again we're dealing with the whole feeling, we didn't have the VBA. A lot of it was really like, "What are some easy things that we can connect? What are some easy systems that we could connect to, to get an easy win with our staff people?" We really focused on three platforms to begin with which were G Suite, Microsoft Office, and WebEx. Those were the three that we primarily focused on. That was four to five years ago.

Marques Stewart: At that time, people were hesitant like, "What is this Okta? What is this type of thing that we're supposed to be using to integrate to all these other platforms?" To now where I stand today. We have over 140 cloud-based applications integrated into Okta with standardized users provisioning, with unique user provisioning that really allows me to have a conversation with folks are like, "What is it that you really want to accomplish with this in terms of user creation, user provisioning, user deactivation, which used to either be manual or not done at all?"

Marques Stewart: When we first implemented Okta, we had to go to people and beg them to please let us integrate your system so that we can make your life a little bit easier to nowadays where people are coming, teams are coming to me with their platforms and saying, "Can you please connect this to Okta so that we don't have to worry about user account creation and all that kind of stuff?"

Marques Stewart: Going from three to 140 just continuing to prove the use case for Okta and continue to prove the value that it brings not only to the IT team, but also to other teams like human resources and finance and other teams within our organization.

John Wilke: Perfect. That's always good when you have people coming to you and asking to use those integrations. We've touched on the business value team has been traditionally focused on dollar savings, but we were actually able to tweak the analysis a little bit, focus a little bit more on those annual hours save. This is something that we've seen recently with education focus customers, university, school systems, colleges where if we can actually go to them and say, "Your students are going to be more productive. They're going to be able to access their study materials, their homework," then that really resonates with them is really powerful.

John Wilke: This is specific to Achievement First at the point in time that we conducted the value realization exercise but since we've been having conversations with Marques talking through some of the big recent changes that I think a lot of IT professionals and IT organizations have been working through recently over the past couple of weeks.

John Wilke: There's actually been a couple of more examples and a couple more initiatives where Achievement First and Okta's partnership has allowed you guys to be a little bit more flexible. We've got a couple of logos and then the security insight screenshot here. Do you mind just talking us through some of those examples that we discussed and just sharing with the audience what we've been talking about over the past couple of weeks, Marques?

Marques Stewart: Yeah. As everyone or most of the folks on this call, I'm pretty sure we're living in a whole new world in which we are working from home or and/or our children are at home doing schoolwork if they're of the proper age. As an educational institution, we had to deal with this massive change in terms of our academic structure in a short period of time. A lot of our stuff is geared... We're not a college or university where we might have a couple of people who do remote learning. Remote learning which just was not really done in our organization which is pretty common for a K12 institutions.

Marques Stewart: When we learned that all of our schools were closing two Fridays ago, we suddenly had to make a shift from like, "How do we support our students and staff who are usually on premise to now they're working from home, they're doing school work from home and all that kind of stuff?" The first thing that we had to think about was like, "What are we going to do for our students in terms of actual connecting a teacher with a student so they can actually continue lesson planning and teaching and all that kind of stuff?" We were not naturally a Zoom customer. We happen to be testing it out for the month of March which is very ironic given all that has changed since the beginning of March.

John Wilke: It feels like it was a year ago, right?

Marques Stewart: Yeah. Every week is a decade at this point. I wanted to do a small pilot with Zoom to see if it was a fit for our organization. Really working with about maybe 10 to 20 people on IT and data teams within basically four days having to deploy it to all 2700 members of our staff, with right permissioning and all that kind of stuff. That's something that just would not have been possible without Okta.

Marques Stewart: The fact of the matter is when the challenge arose, it was like, "Oh, okay." All of a sudden we're supposed to jump on Zoom and had this been the good old days before, we would have had to manually provision and create each of those accounts and it would have taken us at least a full week whereas it took us a couple of days get things going, work out some kinks, and all the staff members were in there and then we could easily turn key to our teachers and say, "Now, you can start teaching," well before they thought that they were going to be able to get access to this platform.

John Wilke: Wow, that's huge.

Marques Stewart: Yeah. We fixed that piece of the puzzle then we have to think about, "Now, we have all these students who now have Chromebooks from us which are Chromebooks." We weren't necessarily built for our students to take Chromebooks home in as massive quantity as they have in this particular instance. So we have to think about, "How do we support them in a way that doesn't overwhelm our IT staff who is not built to support 15,000 students needing some type of technical support directly?" We work through the schools, all that kind of stuff.

Marques Stewart: To that instance, we thought, "We need to stand up a new Zendesk Instance that is just focused for our families and students that are now needing this remote support. We stood it up. Fortunately, we have a couple of other Zendesk Instances already so I knew the process for it. We went from purchasing this new Zendesk Instance to getting it provisioned with our agents who are going to be the agents in it within about an hour.

Marques Stewart: I was informed about it. I said, "Give me an hour to work out all the kinks and go through the process," and then boom. We were ready to go. They were able to turn key in and say, "We can start training people and getting people who have not used Zendesk before as agents. We can now get them ready to go within it." That's something that again is going to be useful for the coming weeks/months of not only providing support for our families but also saving the sanity of our IT team that is not alone [inaudible 00:33:07] support all these students.

Marques Stewart: Then the last part when it comes to SecurityInsights was in regards to now we have all these staff members who are primarily working from home. They're not within the confines of the network organization the majority of the week. During a time of confusion that's also when bad actors try to take advantage of that by sending email or sending something that's just like, "Hey, now that you're working from home, click on this thing. It's trusting." Or "Help support this thing and click on this thing." That is super shady that they should not click on.

Marques Stewart: What we use with SecurityInsights is one, at least it's allowed us to pinpoint when a person's account is compromised. Before Okta, if someone told us their account was compromised, we had no way to really prove it. We would think that your account is acting weird but we would have no way to know for 100% certainty that your account was actually compromised.

Marques Stewart: But with SecurityInsights, most of our staff are in Connecticut, New York, and Rhode Island the majority of the time during the school year for obvious reasons. If we see that at 12:00 you were logged in New Haven, Connecticut and then at 12:15 you suddenly were logging in from London, England, okay, your account was compromised. We have 100% certainty that it happened now. We don't have to ask any questions. It speeds up our remediation time in terms of, "Okay, we just know your account was compromised and we just start the remediation of changing password, signing the person off of all their stuff," and all that kind of stuff.

Marques Stewart: All these tools have really been helpful in this sea of chaos that we are now all living in, in terms of really allowing us to not only continue our educational focus, which is our core mission but also keep in support our staff and family as they work in this new environment as well.

John Wilke: Yeah. Those are some great examples. I think every software as a service solution talks about time to value and it's become a buzzword and I think sometimes loses its meaning. If you go to conferences... It's like journey to the cloud or time to value and it's easy to lose sight without examples like that and anecdotes. [inaudible 00:35:43] being able to get up and running in a couple of hours or a couple of days when there is a time crunch is huge and just a couple of years ago was not possible. Those are great examples. Very, very cool stuff and I'm glad.

John Wilke: It also speaks to how good of an IT professional you are, Marques, that you're able to get all this stuff up and running. You definitely should take a little bit of the credit. It's not all the software. Perfect.

Marques Stewart: Fortunately, I don't have hair so it helped that I didn't have anything to pull out while dealing with all this stuff.

John Wilke: That's right. Yeah. Look at it on the bright side there. Let's actually jump into some questions here. We've got the chat, guys, feel free to go ahead and start typing any questions that you have up to this point via the Intrado chat app. But while you guys are writing any questions, we can answer them live at the end of the session potentially or try to answer them live right now while the recording is running. But we do have some pre-prepared questions. Marissa, do you want to just talk through some key takeaways and questions here?

Marissa Monaco: Perfect. Thanks, John. I just want to remind folks that the goal of the session for us today was to really discuss and understand how nonprofits are thinking about quantifying the value of technology and then with that information, how you're conveying that back to your stakeholders.

Marissa Monaco: Marques, your example today was really great at understanding, your experience from start to finish, and also how that has evolved from you and in terms of how you're able to get that information and speak to the information and the time it takes for you to get that. You're going to be a little bit of a guinea pig of our Q&A since you're live and in the flesh here virtually.

Marissa Monaco: But we do want to also address that doing the assessment takes time and it takes you as a resource to go out and find that information and find the appropriate data that goes into it so that the inputs are accurate, so that when you do have the final results of the assessment you're comfortable you're confident in taking that information and going back to your internal stakeholders and having that conversation with them.

Marissa Monaco: I did want to chat a little bit with you about what that experience was like for you. Let's start with finding the data. I'm sure there were some inputs that were right there on your desk and then there were other inputs that may have been a little bit of a wild goose chase for you and what that example or what that experience was like and maybe an example of having to go track down information and where you follow the breadcrumbs to get the correct information.

Marques Stewart: Okay. When we started with BVA this time, I knew where all the breadcrumbs were just because we've been using Okta for a while but if I think back to when I was just starting with Okta and trying to apply the BVA to that instance, I really thought about like, "What are the pain points? What are the things that people have come to me or my team consistently about that I could leverage this as a win for?"

Marques Stewart: Because like I said when we started off with three applications, we really wanted to set it up in a way so that we could get an easy win so that we could prove the value pretty quickly to those folks who are not as tech savvy or tech leaning, tech forward, as an IT team necessarily would be.

Marques Stewart: That allowed us to really focus on those, get those things correct. But at the same time, I did have this bucket of wish list of applications that were not in my purview that I would want to connect to. In our particular instance, it was our student information system which for those people not in the educational space, the student information system is basically like an HR system for students where you put a lot of personal Information, you put great books, attendance, that kind of stuff into it.

Marques Stewart: For our students and staff, it holds a lot of key information that we would want to secure but for our staff particularly, we want to make sure that that process was as streamlined as possible. But for that particular one, I did not know exactly where to go to get that information. I had to talk to the team that manages that platform to really talk about like, "Hey, I really want to connect Okta to this platform. How do I do it?"

Marques Stewart: They will go to the support team of the platform and figure out any type of information that was necessary for it in that particular case. It actually took a couple of years for the platform to reach the capacity to be able to connect with something like Okta but there were multiple instances whether it's in the finance department or human capital or human resources department in which I knew on the periphery that these were platforms that we use primarily because every time... I only interacted with our HR system when it was time for me to do taxes and I was like, "I do not remember the password to this thing," because I only use it once a year. It was a pain point.

Marques Stewart: For that particular case, I had to follow the breadcrumbs to our human resources and human capital department to really like, "How do we get this thing to be connected and make it easier?" Because if I'm having a problem, I'm sure other people are annoyed with it as well.

Marissa Monaco: Yeah, absolutely. Great. And then once you've done all of this work, you're collecting all of the data, you input in to the assessment, and you have this output. Now, you have this data that you can say, "Here's what we perceive the value of using this technology to be," and to then go back to your internal stakeholders and have that conversation. What was that conversation like for you? How was it received and just generally your comfort level in the output now that you have the data, you have the analysis, you go forth and, and speak about it.

Marques Stewart: I really felt like I was better prepared when it came to... Because I'm not a numbers person. I'm a tech person who deals with troubleshooting problems. Putting a dollar value assigned to a particular thing isn't necessarily in my wheelhouse. But having a platform or system which I can put the numbers and put the data that I do know to then get out a value that I did not know is very helpful to then go to people to our finance department to say like, "Why are we spending X dollars on this thing?" "Well, this thing is actually saving us X more dollars in terms of money."

Marques Stewart: For my particular boss or the people... In our particular case like a regional superintendent or principal is like, "Why do I have to... Why am I going through this process? Why do I go through Okta for this?" It's like, "Well, do you remember when you had these breaches were happening or a teacher would start and all their accounts weren't automatically created, you have to ask IT to be like, 'Hey, can you remember to add to do these five things?'

Marques Stewart: Well, now user provisioning has been dropped down by 60% because we're now more consistent. We have a systematized platform. These are the hours that have been saved. For our IT leaders particular saying like we can literally save a person because the hours that were usually spent that..." Again, I'm not calculating hours but the platform does that. "The hours that were spent just manually doing all this stuff is now time that is not spent doing that."

Marques Stewart: Also, in terms of if something goes wrong, we have a log in which we can go back and say, "We can fix it so that going forward the issue doesn't exist again, saving more time in the future." It's a very comprehensive package that I can take to multiple leaders within our organization and use it to speak to the things that are important to them.

Marissa Monaco: That's great. Now that's very helpful to hear and hopefully helpful for the audience to get a real life understanding of the experience. I think one last question is about the way that you could expand the use of this business value assessment to other technologies.

Marissa Monaco: As an IT leader, you know the technologies that you want to use and the value of them for you but to prove that out internally is as you've just shared a much different conversation. A little bit philosophical. But any thought about being able to leverage an assessment like this but for other technologies that you do use?

Marques Stewart: Yeah, I think it gives you a good baseline just like I did with John when they first introduced to me. There will be a couple of tweaks depending on the technology but I think the overall framing is very helpful for if I'm bringing on a new technology to deal with wireless or phones or something like that just be like, "These are the amount of hours, these are the amount of time that was saved using this platform versus doing it before whether..."

Marques Stewart: For example, I've brought in a cloud-based printer solution that I believe have saved us time in terms of people either needing to connect to a printer or to provision printers to people consistently. I would use the BVA for that particular platform to see like, "What was it like before versus what is it like now?" To really be able to show the value of using that particular technology to deal with an issue that people had before.

Marissa Monaco: Great. That's awesome. All right, Marques, you've been stellar in this Q&A. I appreciate all of your work and feedback here. We're going to head on to our next steps at this point. Again, just a reminder for folks, this session really was for us to show you the work that we're doing around this BVA to tailor to the nonprofit space. We're hoping to continue to enhance this and have more folks come on board and test it out.

Marissa Monaco: With that, our call to action is hopefully you've taken a lot away from today's session and some of that is feedback that you can provide back to this team of additional ways that you could think to engage with Okta's business value assessment specifically for nonprofits. We have contact information here.

Marissa Monaco: If you're interested in participating and filling out your own BVA for your organization, please reach out to either your account executive CSM or myself, John, or Adam and we'd be happy to have you come on board and participate in the next phase of this beta to engage in the assessment and provide any additional feedback as we do want to tailor this to really make sense for the nonprofit world to understand what the value is of the technology for your IT leaders but to be able to then address and speak to that for your other internal stakeholders.

Marissa Monaco: With that, I do want to offer a big thank you to Marques and Mads who helped tremendously with today's presentation and shaping what we have today for the business value assessment for nonprofits. Thank you to everyone in the audience that attended.

Marissa Monaco: If you liked what you saw here today, want to rewatch it, or share with any of your peers, this has all been recorded and will be available to you on demand as well our other Okta for Good sessions. If you haven't seen already are all available on demand as well. Please do check out Why Tech Matters, The Accidental IT Director, and The Solutions-Based Approach to It Management.

Marissa Monaco: We thank you all for your partnership and look forward to hearing your feedback around today's session. Thanks.