Endpoint Management Tips and Tricks with Gong's Director of ITOps

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Ashley: Welcome to the Heroes of IT podcast. Where here at Automox, we talk with all of our IT heroes on what's going on in the state of IT and the realm of endpoint management. My name is Ashley. I'll be your host for today. I'm a Customer Marketing Manager here at Automox and I'm joined by James Sennett. Welcome James.

James Sennett: Thanks for having me, Ashley.

Ashley: Why don't you introduce yourself to our listeners and tell them a little bit about what you do inside of IT?

James Sennett: Yeah, so I'm the Director of IT Operations at Gong. Gong is a revenue intelligence platform. We use our homegrown AI to capture and understand and act on customer interactions. The platform powers revenue workflows, including coaching, forecasting, even strategic initiatives. My role within Gong is to keep our employees working, keep things running and enable them to really do the most with their resources.

Ashley: Very cool. I know I see clips of Gong all over LinkedIn, all over the internet. Especially if you're in the SaaS industry, I think it's a pretty inescapable tool. It's pretty key to a lot of sales organizations.

James Sennett: Yeah, it's a great tool and I love being a part of it to see it grow and see everyone give us that same feedback.

Ashley: Definitely. Well, for those of you who don't know, every year, Automox surveys IT professionals from across the industry, and we produce a State of ITOps report. Inside of IT, we kind of delve into key findings, important things that the IT community is facing, and also some ways to solve that. So today we're gonna go over a few of those key statistics and findings. Without further ado, I'll jump into it.

Our first statistic is that less than half of organizations in IT operations report a high level of IT agility. In fact, only 44% of organizations align themselves with that high agility label. So let's dive into what even is agility in IT operations, James.

James Sennett: Yeah, so I see agility not from the typical, like, you know, ITIL agility definitions, but really it's just our ability to move from one priority to another quickly to be able to support the business. That's really where IT is able to provide value, is being able to be agile and adjust to those business priorities.

Ashley: Yeah, so what would you say is a great first step for people who are maybe knee deep in IT requests?

James Sennett: Yeah, I think it all comes down to that prioritization. So being able to understand what the business is requesting and what actually is important. I think that's somewhere where we get stuck is just in that repetitive ticketing, those repetitive requests and being able to actually cut through that and understand what things need to happen and what things would we just like to happen. That's difficult for IT professionals and IT leaders to really get to the heart of it. But that's where you're gonna get the most value and really provide that agility to the business is by identifying what matters.

Ashley: Yeah, yeah, I know everyone would love to say yes to all requests, but that's definitely not always possible. And it definitely comes at expense of your workday, your stress level, and at the end of the month or the quarter, what you can say you actually checked off on your to do list. Could you give us an example of how you practice IT agility on your team?

James Sennett: Yeah, yeah. So I think the main thing is around what we do say yes to. What do we actually need to provide? We get stuck in this, let's provide a perfect solution. And really, you don't need to provide a perfect solution to every issue. You can provide that minimum viable product, and that continues to let the business run without getting you bogged down in that search for perfection.

So really, allowing yourself to crawl before you walk or run allows you to do more. It allows you to provide greater value. And also reducing those silos. I think a lot of kind of old-school IT departments have very siloed teams. You have your endpoint team, you have your identity team. Being able to reduce the silos and give more overlap to them, allow them to back each other up and collaborate on issues rather than saying this is an identity project and they're the only ones that can touch it, will definitely help you be a little more agile, bring in better ideas and kind of get things done a little quicker.

Ashley: Yeah, it almost sounds silly to say out loud, but it feels like communication is really key and asking for help is really key and collaborations with other people who may have different ways of viewing problems is key. I know I think we all kind of have those concepts in the back of our mind, but actually getting them out and practicing them can make a huge difference.

James Sennett: Yeah, absolutely.

Ashley: Well, let's move on to our second talking point and keeping up with the IT curve. 57% of IT practitioners say that keeping up with technological advances is the most significant challenge that they face in their day to day. Could you talk about some recent technological advances that you've noticed inside of the IT operations space?

James Sennett: Yeah, I think the two biggest ones that I've noticed over the last couple of years have been AI, which I think we can set aside for a moment. But the other one is kind of those low code systems. We're seeing a lot of different companies coming out with these low-code, no-code automation practices and competencies. And it's really advanced what companies are able to accomplish. That's been probably the biggest one, is it reduces the barrier to entry for our end users to be able to create their own solutions.

Ashley: It's always nice to say like, hey, you can actually do this to yourself. You can self-serve. I mean, that's like an incredible answer to a lot of problems. What's your favorite low code or no code offering?

James Sennett: I'd probably say there there's two that come to mind. Um, so one would be Okta's identity governance platform. Uh, it allows us to manage a lot of the, uh, self-service pieces, uh, and give people those, those options. Um, one that Gong is, is leveraging heavily is actually called Workato. Um, we have one engineer in IT who works on this and kind of manages it.

But then we have dozens of citizen developers that are out there building their own like low code or no code solutions to different issues. And they've been able to drive a ton of value for the business, especially our go-to-market teams through that platform.

Ashley: Sure people will be searching that right away after hearing that. But that's awesome. I think that a big difference in IT within this past year and definitely going into 2024 is people do have that, you know, piece of technology that they're a little bit familiar with. You know, people have backgrounds now in coding, but they may exist in different areas of the growth teams, but they still have that little bit of skill that really goes a long way when they're trying to get their projects done.

James Sennett: Yeah, I mean, that's why I think tooling is so important for IT organizations. Just continuing with what you've done in the past really isn't good enough anymore. Mostly because we're being asked to do more, right? Looking at our legacy endpoint solutions, they're great and we enjoy using them, but they don't solve every issue. So that's why we look at other, you know, solutions that are able to allow us to solve a lot of those gaps we have in those products without adding a ton of overhead onto the team. That's actually one of the reasons that we went with Automox is because we were able to really have a team multiplier with just a single tool. It allowed us to close a lot of gaps that we would have otherwise need to bring somebody on to solve.

Ashley: Yeah, I mean, being at Automox, we love to hear that. Is there any specific part of the tool that you feel like this is the time saver, this is what makes it worth everything?

James Sennett: Yeah. So I have one endpoint engineer at Gong. He does everything for us. He's incredibly intelligent, very good at his job, but he's one person. He only has a certain amount of time to do the work. So a year ago, he was spending a lot of time writing scripts, testing, managing those scripts, managing just the policies and other ways that we're trying to. We've been able to cut that down, I would say, almost entirely out of his job through Automox. Because what we've been able to do is instead of him writing a script to patch a system, or him writing something or creating a policy to just reboot a computer, right? We were able to, through Automox, just click a button and say, hey, there's already a Worklet for this. There's already that built-in process that we don't need to go recreate. We don't have to reinvent the wheel every time something comes out. There's already a catalog of all those solutions for us to choose from that Automox has curated and allowed us to use. So being able to kind of like crowdsource that knowledge and those skills has been a game changer for our endpoint posture.

Ashley: That's awesome to hear. And for those of you who are listening who may not use Automox, and may not be super familiar with Worklets which is our key to scripting at scale and automating those things like James mentioned, I'd say it's kind of almost similar to how you have formulas inside of Excel. And you can write one formula for a column and apply it to the entirety of your rows on your sheet and it's all done and calculated for you. I'd say like that is the IT metaphor for it. And let's talk about that other piece. So you said, let's set aside, you know, AI for a second. Let's, let's talk about that because highly agile organizations, which is only about, you know, 44% use AI for identifying vulnerabilities those with low agility. So how are you guys currently using AI? I know it's like this big, scary, intimidating buzzword in the space right now.

James Sennett: Yeah. AI is a like you said, it's intimidating to look at, right? To try to figure out how to use it or how to apply it to your business. The good thing about Gong is we are at our core an AI company. We homebrewed our own AI. That's what we're built on. So we use it every day within our platform. But trying to use it from an IT standpoint or from a business standpoint is a little bit different. Right now, I feel like we're not using it enough. It's something that we keep saying it's coming and it's gonna be here before we know it of being just in every product. We're seeing this being rolled out across every single platform that we have. I get emails constantly saying, hey, try our new AI in beta. So it is something that is going to be there and we have to adapt to it. Right now, we're using it for, to me, some basic pieces. We're not really using it to its full capability. We're replacing Googling, right? So anyone in IT will tell you that's like the basic skill you need is just learn how to use Google. That's kind of changing. Now you can use AI to give you solutions and curate those solutions for you rather than having to sift through search results those websites, you know, we're also using it for things like policy creation, procedure creation. So instead of having to write a whole procedure, we're able to use AI to give us the framework, and then we can customize it for what we need. These are all pretty basic things that it can do and that it's helping us for.

It's not fully there yet, because I think every company is different. You're going to have to still customize it. So it's still going to just use that 80% AI, 20% of you customizing it. Ideally though, we'd be using it for a lot more, right? This is where we see from the operations side, my help desk team would be able to use this for ticket deflection, right? If we can reduce the amount of tickets that come in or just allow users to self-service a little bit more, give them those options through AI, that'll help both end users have a faster response time, get back to doing their job rather than interacting with IT. And it would reduce the amount of strain on IT departments. We're constantly under pressure to improve SLAs, reduce costs, things like that, and AI would really help with that. But going further, it's going to do a lot when it comes to more of those complex issues down the road that behavior monitoring and vulnerability response without having a human interaction, right? Being able to understand overall, like, in-user behaviors, how do we fully respond to those, and how can we predict what's gonna happen? So that's where I think AI is gonna come into play with IT quite a bit, as well as just being able to help us with our automations.

Ashley: Yeah, it's kind of exciting because it feels like the quicker that you master this, like the more possibilities that there are both now in your other projects in your day to day, but also, you know, when that next wave of AI comes out, you kind of really have it fully within your control fully as a skill. And that's kind of cool to think about.

James Sennett: Yeah, this is definitely one of the things that I think about, you know, growing up. I've always had a computer and it's going to, this is the thing that I think is going to separate, you know, some generations of people that grew up with, you know, just the internet and then people that grew up with AI and what they're going to develop and use AI for is going to continue to shift and change. And as leaders in IT, we have to be able to keep up with it.

Really, the biggest struggle is not what AI can do. It's the guardrails we put around it. So how do we work with our compliance and security teams to make sure our companies are using it in a responsible way that fits within our guidelines, but still with enough freedom to bring that value, allow us to really advance the company goals.

Ashley: Yeah, I think those are really good words of advice for people who are looking to make their first ventures into AI or perhaps they can show that clip to higher-ups when making the case for it, for sure.

Okay, so I think that's pretty much everything that we wanted to chat about today. For those of you who are interested in reading the State of ITOps reports, it is now live. You can go and read it and find a bunch of really interesting findings that we didn't have time to get into today but are fun to read about nonetheless.

But thank you so much for joining us today, James. This was an absolute pleasure and it was great hearing your thoughts on all of this.

James Sennett: Yeah, thank you for having me.