Scott Herrmann, VP of Information Systems & Technology at Sheakley

What are the top 2 challenges facing IT organizations this year? What are the top 2 opportunities?

“Tightening up security has been a mandate of mine. We handle a lot of client information and that’s what hackers want – everyone knows just how valuable that information is – so where security and encryption is concerned, we bake it in right from the very beginning. And we have a security challenge on both sides here. One is keeping the hackers out, which means staying ahead of them with technology, which in turn means spending money and that involves convincing the business that the threat is real and ongoing. And because we have to throw a broad net, it complicates everything; it makes things a little more difficult for employees, who will sometimes complain about it. But we’ve got to do it – it’s a must in the world we live in – no one wants to be the next company making news as the latest victim of an attack.

On the other side, we have to focus on the human element inside the company. We have a program designed to help make our people smarter and to help prevent them from letting things get through. The program actually sends test emails of different challenge ratings to our employees and then we can follow up with teaching and training sessions targeting those who clicked on them. We are starting with an anticipated standard baseline of about 28 percent and our goal is to get it down to two to three percent. We recognize that we have to educate our people to be smarter too; we cannot solve every security risk with technology.

Another challenge from a technology perspective is being available across the spectrum of the user habits of our customer base. At one time the business side of IT was pushing out all the cool technologies, but now it’s coming from the young tech natives, who are incorporating work and life in digital spaces and blending marketing and entertainment in social media. So it is an important opportunity for us to put in the technology that allows us to be adaptive to all of our customer base. We have customers across a wide spectrum that includes some folks who might only want a phone call, a middle crowd who will handle a phone call, text or email, and then the younger generation who will want mobile texting and live web chat. If we want a response, we have to be able to communicate to them in the manner that they are best at communicating.”