Expand without Expanding
Scot Whigham, Director of Global IT at IHG and serving for Function-AI, a startup firm
In November 2015, I was sitting in my office at IHG headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia, confronting an ugly state of affairs. As the new Director of IHG Global IT Services and Support, I had recently finished an organizational assessment on how IHG delivers IT support to our corporate and hotel colleagues, and the results, to put it mildly, were not encouraging. We faced challenges with poor customer satisfaction, non-existent self-help, limited resources to meet demand, poor staff morale, poor vendor performance and financial inefficiencies. With our call center agents hot-seating in cubes, we had no room to expand staff capacity, train consistently, or document and deliver standard procedures to meet the demand for Service Desk (Level 1) or Level 2 issues. The problem came down to a succinct challenge: We must expand our availability, capacity and capability without expan