The Interchange IT Podcast spent a week gracing Dallas with its presence at Ivanti’s Interchange conference. We recorded a bunch of episodes, make sure you subscribe to hear the interviews from Ivanti customers and experts.

One of the highlights for the podcast was interviewing two of the keynote speakers. We chatted with Steven Cvetkovic, CISO at Swinburne University, and Keith Lutz, VP of Infrastructure at Mattress Firm.

Steven Cvetkovic

In this episode, we talked to Steven about how Swinburne University is a leader in education in Australia as well as some of the highlights of the conference for him. Steven’s been working in IT for over 30 years. One of his favorite parts was how Interchange helped him gain a better understanding of how he can leverage his current investment in Ivanti products.

Steven gave us insight into some of the challenges he faces, specifically dealing with security and a university. Since universities are all about sharing information, security is a major concern. With the focus on research at Swinburne, it is crucial that his team keeps the research safe. They strive to find a balance between being leaders in technology while still remaining secure.

His team focuses on helping people understand the risks without being the “department of no.” In fact, he’s instructed his team that they cannot say no. Instead, he wants to help enable users by working with them and looking at creative options. Steven feels like this is a great way to build awareness.

During the podcast, we dive into the world of patching as well. Steven sees patching as one of the first lines of defense. He talks about how he’s used Ivanti products to patch, which helped him avoid the fallout from Wannacry last year.

Some challenges that Steven faces are the user experience and user expectation. The cloud also brings challenges. An unexpected challenge is the security issues that come with the rise of social media. As people share so much detailed information about themselves on the internet, it becomes a major security issue. There are so many ways someone could figure out your password based off your social media presence. This is part of the security awareness that Steven feels is so important.

We finish the episode by listening to and IT horror story and discussing the unification of IT.

When it comes to his experience working with Ivanti, Steven has this to say, “It wasn’t a sale. Ultimately, it was really about understand us and how Ivanti could add value… it was all around the partnership. We’re constantly collaborating and working and talking together.”

Keith Lutz

After a quick get-to-know-you lightning round, Keith explains that Mattress Firm has two types of employees, people who sell mattresses and people who support the people who sell mattresses. As a person supporting the mattress salespeople, Keith and his team faced a lot of IT challenges early on.

Mattress Firm has experienced rapid growth, partly due to many acquisitions. For years, Keith felt that his team was fighting IT fires every day. They were chasing tactical problems. One of these major problems was data accuracy. Mattress salespeople weren’t getting the right data to do their jobs correctly. Keith refers to another major problem as “fat fingering,” or mistakes that were made when changes were introduced.

These two problems were long standing issues before Ivanti Identity Director was introduced. To implement Identity Director, the team went to all of their data sources and made sure all the information was correct. Next, they linked the correct data so they could made decisions based off automation.

One of the biggest pain points people had with IT at Mattress Firm was that they don’t deliver fast enough. When it comes to onboarding new employees, users needed to get access to systems immediately in order to be efficient early on. Keith and his team went to HR and talked to them about empowering the HR team to give new employees immediate access to systems. By making the new system a partnership between HR and IT, it allowed HR to solve the pain point and IT to be seen as more strategic.

Today, they’ve made over two million automated transactions with Identity Director. These transactions required no user intervention. Now, his team doesn’t feel like a team of fire fighters. Their overall job satisfaction has increased now that they have the chance to be more strategic. “At the end of the day, people enjoy their jobs who work for IT because they get to be engineers again instead of fight fighters. We allow engineers to be innovative.”

As Keith looks again, he’s always looking for opportunities to improve every day. As the business grows, so do his efforts. He wants to feed more data and more processes into automated systems and he hopes to utilize AI more.

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day. They were chasing tactical problems. One of these major problems was data accuracy. Mattress salespeople weren’t getting the right data to do their jobs correctly. Keith refers to another major problem as “fat fingering,” or mistakes that were made when changes were introduced.

These two problems were long standing issues before Ivanti Identity Director was introduced. To implement Identity Director, the team went to all of their data sources and made sure all the information was correct. Next, they linked the correct data so they could made decisions based off automation.

One of the biggest pain points people had with IT at Mattress Firm was that they don’t deliver fast enough. When it comes to onboarding new employees, users needed to get access to systems immediately in order to be efficient early on. Keith and his team went to HR and talked to them about empowering the HR team to give new employees immediate access to systems. By making the new system a partnership between HR and IT, it allowed HR to solve the pain point and IT to be seen as more strategic.

Today, they’ve made over two million automated transactions with Identity Director. These transactions required no user intervention. Now, his team doesn’t feel like a team of fire fighters. Their overall job satisfaction has increased now that they have the chance to be more strategic. “At the end of the day, people enjoy their jobs who work for IT because they get to be engineers again instead of fight fighters. We allow engineers to be innovative.”

As Keith looks again, he’s always looking for opportunities to improve every day. As the business grows, so do his efforts. He wants to feed more data and more processes into automated systems and he hopes to utilize AI more.

Subscribe and never miss a new episode!

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