Cost savings this past year at IOT
IOT works hard to provide quality customer service while trying to drive down costs. The centralized approach to IT enables the state to leverage quantities of scale, lowering prices for all. Here are two examples of where IOT was able to lower costs.
In 2018, IOT transitioned to a new support vendor, Genesys, to support agency contact centers. The switch increased our available support tools and dramatically improved the quality of our support engagement with the vendor.
This change not only saved the state $8k, plus another $75k in additional value, but the new vendor has already put in place a high-quality, portable, and automated callback system in place at no additional cost due to the overwhelming amount of professional service hours they included in their bid. These changes should increase responsiveness and effectiveness of support annually.
Additional cost savings in 2018 were created by the WAN and Remote Site Infrastructure department of IOT. Last year, the group completed more than 200 projects and were able to reduce network connectivity costs. The WAN department was able to do this by negotiating better rates and moving agencies to better connectivity. Ultimately, the group was able to cut costs by 4% or ($227,478.35) and increased bandwidth as well.
IOT’s mission is to provide cost-effective, secure, consistent, reliable enterprise technology services to our partner agencies, and we will continue to strive for cost savings in each department every year.
Protecting Citizen Data
IOT executed a statewide phishing simulation last month to continue the cybersecurity awareness process through an exercise. The timing of the simulation leveraged the holiday season, which is typically one of increased risk for users in regard to phishing campaigns. The simulated phishing messages were rated as “easy” to recognize.
The performance of the workforce was excellent. The failure rate across the state was less than one-half of one percent. Though the messages were easy to recognize, results were better than expected. This positive outcome confirms that the work put in by agencies to have their staff complete IOT’s monthly cybersecurity awareness activities is having the desired effect.
Below are some facts and figures about the simulation:
* More than 39,000 phishing messages were generated to email addresses in the state’s directory. This included employees, contractors, interns and generic/service accounts.
* 185 workforce members clicked on the link in the message. Clicking on a link is a failure. Opening a message is not a failure. The overall failure rate was .0047 (.47%).
* 16 different templates were used. The most effective template induced a 1.4% failure rate. The templates played on a range of emotions including fear, greed, curiosity, goodwill, etc.
* Our workers recognized the phony messages and reported them at a high rate to the IOT Help Desk, IOT Security team, through the SPAM button, and via agency contacts. Comparatively, for every failure we had more than 25 workers report the phony messages.
* Why is all this good news? In their "Data Breach Digest" Verizon researchers said that 90 percent of the data-loss incidents the team investigates have a "phishing or social engineering component." Success against phishing equates to improved protection of confidential citizen information.
There are more phishing simulations planned in the future. They will target different workforce segments and feature increased levels of complexity. Please continue to encourage your staff to complete the monthly security awareness activities.
Get Parking Alerts
In an effort to help direct state employees to available parking at the Indiana Government Center, IDOA Parking Services is using GovDelivery and GovLinks to get important messages to those who subscribe.
With the help of these two products offered by IOT, IDOA Parking Services will now send text and email alerts to subscribers in real-time as the parking facilities reach capacity on non-holiday weekdays during legislative session and beyond.
GovLinks is used to create short URLs that are analyzed in an analytics program to track effectiveness and message reach per platform. GovDelivery is the State of Indiana’s primary means of sending mass emails to citizens, employees, vendors and others. The platform engages subscribers through email, texts (SMS), social media and websites.
IDOA Parking Services operates two multi-level parking garages and two surface lots, offering a total of approximately 7,000 parking spaces to state employees and visitors to Indiana Government Center.
To sign up for the parking alerts, please visit: https://on.in.gov/govpark. Make sure to select “Government Center Parking Alerts” under “Government Center Parking Services” to receive these alerts.
If you or your organization is interested in creating a request for a new, short URL, a user must first be granted access to the GovLinks App. Please contact Graig Lubsen at Glubsen@iot.in.gov to request access.
How-to Jabber
Let’s start at the beginning: Jabber makes things simple. It delivers instant messaging, voice and video calls, voice messaging, desktop sharing and conferencing. You create your list of contacts, see whether that contact is available and collaborate.
Add New Contacts to Jabber
Add people to your contact list by searching for them in your organization. Once they are on your contact list, you can easily double-click on their names to start a phone call or a chat.
1. In the hub window, select the Menu icon.
2. Select File > New > Contact.
3. Start typing the person’s name to search the directory.
4. Select which group to add the new contact to and select OK.
Click here to watch a Jabber video.
Collaborating with Contacts
Whether sending a file or just a simple instant message, everything is there on one screen.
With the send screen capture icon, you can snap an image from your desktop and send it in an instant message to the person you need to collaborate with. This allows the two (or more) of you to work on projects together remotely.
1. Click on the contact you want to share with.
2. In the right-hand corner, click on the first square. Click and drag cursor over area you want to share.
3. Send and collaborate!
New features of vFire 9.10.2
vFire, the product IOT and other agencies use to manage support tickets, has a variety of new features to enhance its abilities and user experience. Some of the more significant ones are discussed in detail in this word document.
Summary of new features
1. Add Objects and send Emails without Taking Ownership
2. IOT Customer Feedback Request Process (IOT-Specific Feature)
3. Default Suspension Time of a Call
4. Propagate Emails Added to Parent Calls to Their Children (Linked) Calls
5. Propagate Objects Added to Parent Calls to Their Children (Linked) Calls
6. Return Forwarded Call to Sender’s Queue
7. Search Inside Attachments for Knowledge Bank and Calls, Tasks, Request
8. New Modernized Look to the Menus (but the same Workflows/overall functionality)
vFire functionality continues to improve and increase. The Service Management Department will continuously work with vFire’s vendor (Alemba) to make the transition of any future enhancements into our current vFire system as smooth as possible.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns about this upgrade, please let the vFire support team know by emailing them at VSM-IOT-Administrators@iot.IN.gov.