So at a high level, we all know that a CIO can add value to the way a business is run. We know that by managing the IT department and motivating IT staff, the CIO can keep the email system and network running. However, that is not good enough. How can the CIO really transform the business? What does he/she have to do to make a difference? It turns out that at Ascend One they know the answer to this question…

Who are Ascend One and what do they do?

Ascend One is a company that works with consumers who have accumulated a lot of debt. As you can well imagine, a key part of the service they offer are the agents who speak to clients who are drowning in a sea of ​​debt.

Ascend One had a problem. Their contact center and their people were a critical part of the business, as well as a major expense. In the year 2000, this part of the company occupied two buildings and was located near Baltimore, Maryland.

One of his biggest challenges was trying to keep the computers used by his 600 call center employees up to date. Every time there was an update to any of the software they used, it required the IT department to shut down and spend their time trying to push 600 software updates to the 600 workstations the staff used.

To further complicate matters, the workstations used by staff weren’t getting any younger: As software became more demanding, the end-of-life date for this expensive corporate asset loomed ever closer. .

What did Ascend?

Ascend One’s IT department knew they needed to do something and do it fast. What they decided to do was bite the bullet and create a virtual desktop environment for their call center staff to use. What this meant was that the call center agent’s old PCs would no longer run their desktop applications, instead all the heavy lifting would be done on internal servers and only a browser would be required to display the results on each PC.

The ultimate goal of this transformation was to allow customer service agents to stop worrying about upgrading their PCs and spend more time providing credit counseling to their customers. Centralized storage and management of all their applications on virtual desktops allowed them to do this.

What about security?

You may have guessed it by now: A side benefit of desktop virtualization was that it meant Ascend One call center staff no longer HAD to go to a fixed location to get their work done. There was just one problem: how could they securely access the virtualization servers from their homes?

As it turned out, Ascend One didn’t want to have to send staff to each remote worker’s home to set up their bewildering array of different types of computers. Instead, what Ascend One did was sit down with Dell and explain exactly what the minimum configuration was that they needed, and then they created a disk image that allowed a computer to access their back office securely. Now every new call center employee is shipped a brand new Dell computer and it works right out of the box.

This has had the added benefit for Ascend One that they have been able to hire workers on the West Coast. This means they can operate their call center for an additional three hours each day without having to work multiple shifts.

What all this means to you

In the end, each CIO is judged based on the value they have been able to bring to their company. Keeping things running isn’t enough – you have to do things that actually make the business work better.

The Ascend One IT Shop has shown how to do this. They faced the challenge that their frontline staff were spending too much time on IT work and not enough time working with customers. The IT department implemented a desktop virtualization solution and it has paid off.

As a CIO, you will need to be on the lookout for opportunities to add value to your company. It’s not always going to be the big CRM implementation projects that will advance your career, sometimes it can be as simple as finding something else to virtualize…