IOT Next Level Customer Service
Last year, the Indiana Office of Technology closely examined how we conduct our operations and business, looking for ways we could improve our agency. The resulting plan, called Next Level IOT, refocused our agency on shared beliefs around, among other things, customer service. It has been a little more than a year since we launched Next Level IOT and last month we held our annual all team meeting to review the results of our customer-focused approach and what we had accomplished in the past year. Among the awards given to outstanding individuals, we named Matt Johnson from the Operational Security team as the first Next Level Ambassador of the Year for his role at IOT.
The award, voted upon by his colleagues, recognizes the person who best represents each of IOT’s core Next Level beliefs.
The beliefs he exemplified are:
• Service: I am focused on the needs of internal and external customers and I deliver an experience that exceeds customer expectations.
• Solve It: I am empowered to solve problems. We are free to be proactive. I offer alternative business solutions.
• Change: I make sure that the decisions for changes in practices, procedures, systems, etc. include the participation and communication to all aspects of IOT.
• Contribution: I ensure that my work matters to the success of state government operations. I understand my role and align my daily actions with agency results and work to improve performance every day.
• Business Partner: I take into account the risk and business needs of our agency customers. I work with our customers to resolve procedural differences with mutually satisfactory solutions.
• One IOT: I am committed to achieving agency results as one team, regardless of my work location. I know that if 1 fails, we all fail.
IOT is committed to work together and do better each day, and will continue to provide the best service to the state.
Achieving "green" & Delivering Core Services
One of IOT’s four Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is Core Service Delivery Level. Monthly, we measure 29 metrics to see how we are doing providing services to our customers. IOT, like each of your agencies, we are constantly being asked to do more with existing resources. For IOT, that meant on some occasions some of our Core Services began to slip a little into low-green, high-yellow. As part of Next Level IOT, we have a goal to have our overall agency metric be green for eight of twelve months in 2019. Thus far, we are off to a great start, hitting the mark in each of the first three months. In fact, for March, all of our agency metrics were rated in green, which was the first time that has happened since 2014.
Protecting employees from cyber attacks
The mission of IOT is to provide cost-effective, secure, consistent, reliable enterprise technology for our partner agencies. In recent years security has become a more prominent part of our operations. IOT uses a variety of tools to keep state data secure, one of which is FireEye.
FireEye, an operations security technology used by IOT, provides hardware, software, and services to investigate cybersecurity attacks, protect against malicious software, and analyze IT security risks.
FireEye analyzes domains, IP addresses, threats and can examine files suspected of being malware.The service detects and prevents malicious attachments in emails, spoofing and threats hidden in password-protected files.
FireEye offers 24/7/365 security, and since March 2018, there have been over 100,000 malicious actions blocked by the service. FireEye will continue to be used by IOT to make sure the State of Indiana data remains secure.
Phishing scams are emails from what seems to be a trustworthy company or person, but they try to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords or credit card details.
These scams usually contain an urgent request for personal financial information and contain links that when clicked on, are usually malware.
Things to look for:
• Is the sender’s email address legitimate? Is a legitimate domain used?
• Are you expecting the email or is it a standard request? If not, be wary and look more closely.
• Does the email seem unusual or out of context?
• Does the email request you to do something urgently, imply negative consequences, or pitch a good message?
• Check for spelling or grammar mistakes.
• Hover over the provided links: Simply copy and paste the link into Google to make sure it’s real.
• How do they address you? If only “Valued Customer,” it could be fraudulent.
• Review the signature.
• Does the email have the external red warning banner, yet claim to be from an Indiana government employee?
In addition to IOT’s monthly cybersecurity training videos, LinkedIn Learning offers a wide variety of training videos too. Here are a couple that could be helpful. For these videos and more, visit LinkedIn Learning or click the videos here and here.
Delivering great government service
One of Gov. Holcomb’s five Next Level Indiana pillars is delivering great government service - making sure Hoosiers know their tax dollars are being used responsibly and efficiently.
Delivering great government service is part of IOT’s mission, and we are constantly driving forward on this in a number of areas. In one example, the Chief Technology Officer, is combing through all the capabilities that the state has in existing contracts and subscriptions, making sure we are wringing all the value we can from those agreements.
Thus far, IOT has developed and implemented the security and operational governance necessary to enable the state to leverage additional capabilities of Office 365. There are a variety of products available within Office 365, including Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint. IOT will begin to roll out these capabilities thoughtfully over the next few months.
While IOT has a lot of existing contracts, we also are looking to future technologies and preparing the needed infrastructure to implement them at the state. At the end of March, IOT, MPH, INDOT and ISDH representatives attended a workshop to explore the Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning capabilities of Microsoft’s Azure cloud. There are certainly opportunities in this area to better and more efficiently deliver services to constituents.
In April, IOT visited the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago to dig into more of the capabilities of the Azure Cloud Online Services including Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power BI (Business Intelligence) and Microsoft Power Apps. Look for more information as we work to develop the governance for those capabilities.