#198: Saint Mary's Student-Run Help Desk + SolarWinds' 3X ROI Higher Ed Solutions [EDUCAUSE 2024]

Joe Toste: Welcome to the Public Sector Show by TechTables. Super excited to have you both here.

Tyler Horning: Tyler Horning. I've been in this industry for 25 plus years. I'm general field account manager for SolarWinds, so handling all the SolarWinds portfolio for Public Sector for the Midwest. And from a fun facts standpoint, I'm a pretty kid centered. I spend a lot of time with the kids and making sure they're all good.

Tyler Horning: Try to get out and fish and boat as much as I can. Love it. What are the ages of your [00:01:00] kids? Youngest is 19, my daughter, the middle one is 23, and the oldest is 26. Daughter, boy. Okay,

Joe Toste: nice.

Tyler Horning: Awesome.

Joe Toste: And where do you live actually?

Tyler Horning: Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha, Nebraska. Omaha,

Joe Toste: Nebraska, yep.

Tyler Horning: Been all over the United States.

Tyler Horning: Went to school in Colorado and lived in Dallas and lived in Chicago. But yeah, about the last 20 years or so, I've been in Omaha.

Joe Toste: You know my favorite, not my favorite, I shouldn't say favorite. One of the coolest people that lives in Omaha, Nebraska. Warren Buffett, right? Does he live there?

Tyler Horning: Yeah. Absolutely.

Tyler Horning: Yeah, we bump into him every now and then. Spend a lot of time with Suzy Buffett actually.

Joe Toste: Okay, nice. Yeah, that's awesome. Big Warren Buffett fan. Haven't been to the Brookshire? Yeah, I want to. Do it. I know, it's on my list. It's on my list. Kathy.

Kathy Hausmann: Kathy Hausman. I am the director of digital infrastructure and support services at St.

Kathy Hausmann: Mary's College. I've been at St. Mary's for 23 years. And my job role has changed over the years. But I've always been front facing customer support [00:02:00] and tech support. And that's really where my heart is as all of my job responsibilities have changed. I am a huge Star Wars fan. And I'm married and have a daughter that's 19 years old.

Joe Toste: She also a fan?

Kathy Hausmann: Not as big as I am. She is a Disney fan, though. Okay. So

Joe Toste: Nice. Favorite Star Wars character?

Kathy Hausmann: The Millennium Falcon.

Joe Toste: The Millennium Falcon? That's your favorite character? That is

Kathy Hausmann: my favorite character. I was gonna ask

Joe Toste: what is your favorite movie, but do you stand like when you go to Disney, then you go to Disneyland, do you stand in front of the Millennium Falcon?

Joe Toste: Are you that woman? Who's I've made it and they're like, there's like the Chewbacca. We seen the giant millennium Falcon.

Kathy Hausmann: I have been there. I have done the picture with my arms raised and I have been photo bombed by Chewbacca in front of the millennium Falcons.

Joe Toste: Nice. That's awesome. I, we, my family, we really like Ah, Soca.

Joe Toste: So one time, family was in some different park. I went to get some food, crazy line. I end up walking through star Wars land. Run into Ahsoka, and I'm like, oh my [00:03:00] goodness, I gotta get a, I gotta get a picture. She's no, so I end up talking to her, and she's oh, this is crazy let's do a video for your wife and kids, and I'm like, okay.

Joe Toste: So she starts, she's hey Jamie, hey Jack, hey Annabelle, it's me, Ahsoka. And I send it to my wife, and she just is losing it. She's runs back over where is she? And I'm like, oh, she's gone now. That was like 30 minutes ago, babe. Yeah, anyways, big fan. Really like the Star Wars 2. I gotta ask, what's your favorite movie?

Kathy Hausmann: A New Hope.

Joe Toste: A New Hope. Okay. New Hope. Any of the animated ones?

Kathy Hausmann: I actually haven't watched the animated one. Clone Wars? Clone Wars? I started Clone Wars, but I didn't get all the way through it yet. Disney Plus is a wonderful thing to catch up.

Joe Toste: Yeah, Disney plus is fantastic. Next to Star Wars Bluey and art.

Joe Toste: At least for the six year old is a big one. It's a big one right now. So we're going to, we're going to turn it and we can turn it to on the tech side. But so you've got this incredible transformation story. You mentioned, I think just off [00:04:00] camera that, you've been there or the help desk for about the last 10 years.

Joe Toste: You've had a lot of time to refine it, which is fantastic. Walk us through that journey, what did it look like in the beginning to where you are in almost 2025?

Kathy Hausmann: We have two areas of support. We have ResNet, which provides student tech support, and we have the Help Desk, which is faculty staff support.

Kathy Hausmann: When I walked to the doors to St. Mary's, the student support was literally tracked by post it notes and voicemails. I was horrified. So that was the first thing I did. The first month I was there, I wrote a tracking system in HTML, CDML, FileMaker Pro backend, so that we had something to actually work, track, follow up with students record what issues were so we had a way to find out, Oh, we keep having this problem, how do we fix it in the future?

Kathy Hausmann: And we outgrew what I wrote and I was looking for something new. The helpdesk on the same side was outgrowing their [00:05:00] freeware helpdesk software. And it was like, okay, what can we use that might help both? So I asked the support team to give me their wish list of features that they wanted.

Kathy Hausmann: Used that list, narrowed down software that was available at the time. And found Web Helpdesk. And I didn't get the buy in to purchase it for the helpdesk and the IT staff. But I did get the approval to get it for ResNet. Because that's much smaller and it didn't involve the IT staff. It was just me and my student staff.

Kathy Hausmann: And we implemented it. We went live over spring break in 2014. And we haven't looked back. It's worked, it's been solid, and it gives us the ability to look at and track problems, but we also use the FAQ feature, so when students are reporting problems, [00:06:00] we can actually have information pop up right in front of them on the screen and say, here's some troubleshooting tips.

Kathy Hausmann: So they might not even have to finish asking for help, we've given them the answer.

Kathy Hausmann: And then, after that was a successful rollout, The following July, we implemented it for our faculty staff helpdesk.

Joe Toste: So heading into 2025 what's the next generation of the helpdesk?

Joe Toste: How are you thinking about this as technology is just changing so quickly, expectations are changing?

Kathy Hausmann: There's a couple of things that we did very intentionally at the start with not having faculty and staff submitting their own tickets. The students do, and some of that is just because of time response.

Kathy Hausmann: We don't want somebody in a classroom, in the middle of a class, submitting a ticket. We want them to call us. We want to drive that traffic to the fastest response method. But things are changing. Should we revise that? When I implemented Web Help Desk for our faculty and staff, I built it Knowing that we could go [00:07:00] down that path.

Kathy Hausmann: We just had to have other systems in place for that immediate response before we could turn it on. The student support's been great. Students, they can fill out the form, they know how to do it, it's easy, they get immediate feedback. And we can respond very quickly to anything they ask for.

Joe Toste: On the response side, are the students the one, they're running it too?

Joe Toste: Do you have students in place, or?

Kathy Hausmann: So our ResNet support for students is entirely student run. Love it. We've got staff members who supervise, but they are our frontline support. Same with the faculty staff help desk. It's students on that frontline. It's students answering the phone. It's the students answering the emails.

Joe Toste: I love that. Okay. Now I'm just curious. So just bear with me. So I imagine like when I think about like workforce pipeline, providing tangible skills for these students, what does that look like after that?

Kathy Hausmann: I have been so fortunate to work with some amazing students who We're able to use the experience they've had [00:08:00] working in our IT department at ResNet at Helpdesk and go on to great jobs.

Kathy Hausmann: I have a programmer at JPMorgan Chase. I've got a Google engineer, former students of mine doing great things. Because they learned on the front lines, the customer service side. So while they're learning programming, they are also learning and understanding how to solve the problems and know what people are going to ask, what they're not going to understand.

Kathy Hausmann: So they're seeing that other side of what they're programming, which is very valuable.

Joe Toste: Okay, that's fantastic. So Tyler, let's shift to partner side. Can you speak to the ROI, how SolarWinds is partnering with St. Mary's College, and what it looks like, especially with your background and experience?

Joe Toste: Sure. Web help

Tyler Horning: desk, user experience, support services, they're nebulous. So it's hard to put an ROI, like an actual number against it. We find a better measurement is a time to value. And so we actually, it was timely, this particular conversation is that we did a survey a lot very long ago across a bunch of [00:09:00] higher ed and universities and I got a lot of feedback and so we were asking around time to value and typically we see 23, 24 days past implementation seeing it.

Tyler Horning: Some of the respondents came back and said, we're seeing value within five days. If you have to put an ROI on it, cause that was one of the questions they said like 51 percent came back with 20, I'm sorry, a one X or two X their investment. With 17 percent coming back with a 3x of their investment.

Joe Toste: That's all good in technology world. Nice. Curious, I'm sure this isn't the only college you work with. Are there like some similarities that you've seen across your portfolio at SolarWinds? Yes! Yes!

Tyler Horning: Absolutely! Understaffed, lack of funds, lack of support, not very good user experience your staff isn't trained professionally, you have to do that internally and work it. Yeah it's a common struggle for everybody. Okay. It's not limited to campuses.

Joe Toste: Kathy we talked about the, a little bit of the hard numbers, but we'll go with the soft side of the reporting.

Joe Toste: That you mentioned just in ticket [00:10:00] submissions. How has that really impacted at the student level? Because I imagine. The response time, students submit tickets. It's also student run. It's got to be fun to see the students start clicking where they can, they start figuring it out. And then if they can start nailing down some of those submission tickets a lot quicker, a lot sooner.

Joe Toste: Can you just maybe talk about that process of how are you driving improvement in that area?

Kathy Hausmann: At the moment, nearly 50 percent of our tickets are resolved within one day. And I can do those stats because of Web Help Desk. But, we do get a lot of walk in traffic, phone traffic where the student walks in and our student staff can help them on the spot.

Kathy Hausmann: And if they don't know what the problem is, they can look at previous tickets, say, oh, we've seen this problem before, this is the answer. So even if it wasn't that student who's seen that problem before, they know and they can look up that information. It's a very friendly interface for them. The emails the students don't [00:11:00] answer directly, but they have to be kept aware of what we're telling students.

Kathy Hausmann: So when they come onto their shifts, they can sign in and look at the tickets and they can see what's been done and they can see, Oh, these are the problems that are happening right now. So that if somebody comes to the door, And oh, yes, we're having a problem with this right now. Let me help you.

Kathy Hausmann: They know what that ticket du jour is.

Joe Toste: No that's really good. Tyler, on the kind of the innovation side, email notifications, custom workflows, a lot of that stuff from the case study that I gleaned, very gleaned quickly looked like it was like a pretty good game changer. Walk us through how higher ed Universities in your portfolio are leveraging some of the other technical capabilities of web workflow.

Tyler Horning: Mentioned it right off the bat, right? We've spent a lot of time in the self help portal, right? Being able to have students for common precedents, common issues, being able to address it themselves, and being able to take care of it in a very timely fashion, right? IT is hard, no matter what, and to make it easy and to make [00:12:00] it usable is a big thing.

Tyler Horning: Another area that we spend a lot of time with, is the automated traffic flow and escalations. Getting the right problem to the right person at the right time is pretty crucial. And then developing a lot of time and effort around the knowledge base. We have a lot of very common questions.

Tyler Horning: They're all asked differently, but the resolution is usually the same. And being able to get to that resolution very quickly is extremely helpful. And then reporting and analytics, right? Being able to see IT trends, being able to see performance, how things are going, being able to have data driven decisions.

Tyler Horning: And being able to leverage that and fold it back in to make everyone's user experience better.

Joe Toste: No, that's fantastic. Cathy, I want to go into the the scaling of the staff. Recruiting the students, trying to, I'm sure that's got to be tough initially. How do you source the students? How do you pitch this to them?

Joe Toste: How do you build that pipeline? I'm interested in this one

Kathy Hausmann: too. We recruit, we hang posters on campus, we send emails, we use word of mouth, we have our own students reach out to their friends [00:13:00] we go to certain departments and say, will you talk about this to your classes? This is a great opportunity, not just for a campus job, but for the opportunities it gives you for, your resume and for other things.

Kathy Hausmann: And so we work with that. We have small student staff. And it's, we've got less than a half dozen students working in ResNet. We've got about a half dozen students working in Help Desk. So we want them to be able to pick up the tool quickly, learn it, be comfortable with it because honestly if it's not something that they feel they can use, feel comfortable with it.

Kathy Hausmann: They're not going to want to use it, and then they're not going to want to work for us.

Joe Toste: Yeah.

Kathy Hausmann: It works both ways. They have to be happy with the tool, and then we have to get the benefits.

Joe Toste: When, what is the, what does the training program look like? How do we structure that?

Kathy Hausmann: We bring the students back the Sunday before classes start.

Kathy Hausmann: And they do training that Sunday [00:14:00] afternoon and evening. Training all day Monday. Training all day Tuesday. Wednesday, we do a half day, and then we give them a half day off. And we usually try to do some kind of social activity to make it fun. And then we have orientation weekend. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

Kathy Hausmann: And I tell the students that is training. That is a part of training. They're not let loose. They're going to see, though, everything they're going to see in an academic year. Over the course of those four days.

Tyler Horning: Yeah.

Kathy Hausmann: All the networking questions. All of the, I'm locked out of my email. How do I do this?

Kathy Hausmann: How do I do that? It all hits in those first four days. And then we have the first week of classes.

Tyler Horning: Yeah.

Kathy Hausmann: Which is then a different set of problems. How do I get to my online textbooks? How do I do this? How do I do that? My, my professor wants me to be able to access this. How do I do it? And we're showing them things that really only happen in that first or second week of classes every semester.

Joe Toste: Yeah.

Kathy Hausmann: And then by that [00:15:00] point, they're trained. They can face anything or they know how to look up the information. And one of the important things we cover in training is that it's okay to say, I don't know, let me ask my supervisor.

Joe Toste: Then they call Tyler, right? Sure. No, they don't call Tyler.

Kathy Hausmann: Because I would much rather them ask somebody.

Kathy Hausmann: Then to do the wrong thing and break that further.

Joe Toste: Okay. Tyler, how often do you get a chance to come on campus?

Tyler Horning: We try to get on campus as much as we can, right? We're stretched in like everybody else, so leverage as much technology as we can, but very happy to come and visit with anybody. The whole point of the web help desk and service and support is communication and making sure that the users and what they're trying to do to support it, and everyone has very clear communication of what their expectations are and trying to meet those.

Tyler Horning: Same thing from us for manufacturers. We want to make sure you know what you think or what you need and what we have are aligned. So usually you can do that with, better over a handshake and a desk than a

Joe Toste: [00:16:00] webcam. Nice. So I'm curious. I'm hoping Tyler doesn't kill me, but hey bring it.

Joe Toste: So Kathy, I'm interested. What's your wishlist? For Tyler? What's what's missing That you would want, he's on camera, so you can hold him to it. I can hold him to it. Yeah. All ears are on. What's your wishlist? If you could wave a magic wand, what is it that you would love in this product?

Kathy Hausmann: The one thing I would love it's a feature that we're using in web help desk.

Joe Toste: Okay.

Kathy Hausmann: It's the frequently asked questions so students can fill out their own ticket and say, I need help with. And then select from the pop up and then it pops up the frequently asked questions and so this or you know Here's the answers.

Kathy Hausmann: Here's the troubleshooting tips. Try this first So we have no idea how many people start filling out a ticket get the FAQ See the troubleshooting tips try them and then abandon their ticket. Like how many people did we help? without actually [00:17:00] needing to communicate with the person So that's what's missing.

Kathy Hausmann: And I think that's probably very hard to figure out, but it would be right to know. Between like

Tyler Horning: surveys

Joe Toste: or something, right? Yeah. I don't know. We'll have to, yeah that's what we're talking about. If you're the product team from solar winds watching this is a great Daniel. We got some work to do.

Tyler Horning: Yeah,

Joe Toste: No, every software does. So yeah. But I think when you have a customer on, this is like so fascinating. I do this all the time for myself, like just, and my customer is. We'll just call it basically CXOs who are coming on the podcast, but just intimately understanding. I'm always asking questions like, if you could do this, you could do that.

Joe Toste: Or what do you want from the podcast? Or I also host a private community of CXOs. And so I'm always constantly like picking brains from folks. And I always think about things like building a product like continuously. And so not Tyler's job, not putting that pressure on Tyler. To the product team listening.

Joe Toste: This is a great one. We'll clip and he can just send it and like maybe they'll know. So helpdesk technology is evolving very [00:18:00] quickly. I know we've got the foundation but I'm curious, Tyler, what's the, is there any future plans, you can try to speak to the vision of it, but I'm curious internally if there's any gen AI integration.

Joe Toste: I'm just spitballing at this point, but I'm just curious if there's anything like that. As

Tyler Horning: a general rule. SolarWinds, we don't talk about futures or new product releases until they're actually out. We keep that pretty close to the chest. But what I can tell you is, with the acceleration and advent of, artificial intelligence and machine learning, specifically around the the knowledge bases, and being able to apply those knowledge bases to specific things as quick as possible, and then deeper, more native integrations with currently deployed infrastructure.

Tyler Horning: So you don't have to do all these workarounds. And so with all these things coming together at a very rapid rate, it's a, it's exciting times. I guess I'll just say

Joe Toste: that. Yeah, I haven't dived into the product, but what this reminds me most similar in a different area of public sector would be like a lot of the student run SOCs, so the security operations centers, where there's, they have like junior analysts, and a lot of them are getting, they're leveraging AI [00:19:00] to help find and spot and which I was like thinking, Oh, hey, you know what?

Joe Toste: This is probably the next generation of whatever that is. And I know probably every company on the planet is being

Tyler Horning: able to apply very large, complex decision trees and make it humanly easy.

Joe Toste: Yeah. And just on your data. So it's not hallucinating at the bar doing something crazy. Yeah.

Joe Toste: So anyway, so I work with high school students. And so coaching basketball and so I'm constantly talking with them, constantly meeting with them, even the ones that have graduated that kind of come back, I'm constantly just like picking their brains. So I always love the kind of on the ground because those students will start to point you of oh, hey, we would love X, Y, Z or whatever.

Joe Toste: And so that's like the product guy.

Tyler Horning: As we all have kids, right? And I see a lot is. Kids don't want to call the help desk. Kids don't want to open up a ticket. Kids don't want to go talk to the, genius bar at Apple. They just want it fixed. And so there's a little bit of a

Joe Toste: maturity there.

Joe Toste: Yeah. No, this is great. Is there anything else that you would [00:20:00] want me to bring up that I haven't brought up already? Because I don't know, I don't know it as well as you.

Kathy Hausmann: We've been fortunate. We've been able to do a lot of customization with web help desk to really meet our campus culture.

Kathy Hausmann: And it's set up, and it's designed to work with students. Students in mind, if a student doesn't respond after a couple of times, we have a three strikes category in the software, so that we know, okay, one more time we'll try to get a hold of them, and then we'll close it, because it's probably resolved, they just don't want to contact us, because they don't.

Joe Toste: They just

Kathy Hausmann: want it fixed. It was fixed. Problems, taken care of. I don't need to reply anymore. Helpdesk side, it's employees. We can take a different approach. We can make it automated. If we contact them, we can set it. We've got a category with programming behind it waiting for response. If we don't hear from them, it sends a reminder.

Kathy Hausmann: And it sends another reminder. It sends another reminder. Great. Close the ticket. Because they're an employee. They can actually deal with the [00:21:00] automation. And that's, part of that campus culture. High touch. Taking care of the students. Versus, okay, dig your banner problem, get fixed.

Kathy Hausmann: You can just reply to the email and say, yep, it's fixed. Or you can ignore the email and we'll close it. No. Little things like that, that, the customizations really work so we can make it our own. And that's what I like about it.

Tyler Horning: Yeah, that's one of the things that's really popular about Web Help Desk is Being able to customize it for the library or for students or for faculty or staff and being, each experience is different and it requires a different level of support and having the same guy being able to move through all those users.

Joe Toste: I love that. That's no, that, that seems like it's a ton of fun. So the next time if Tyler comes to me, he goes, Hey Joe, I want to come on the podcast. I'm going to go, okay, I want, we're going to meet. I also want a demo so I can play around with it. That way I always get to know the products or whatever it is, as much as I can as, one person, but I'm pretty curious, so I always love poking around and diving into [00:22:00] the kind of that experience, but I love the stuff you highlighted with the students just how mission focused you are with supporting them, helping them seems like Tyler is a great partner.

Joe Toste: That case study, how old is that case study? I don't know, actually.

Kathy Hausmann: Yeah, it's been quite a while.

Joe Toste: Four years?

Kathy Hausmann: At least.

Joe Toste: Four or five years, okay. And you are still coming on with Tyler from SolarWinds, which means this has got to be a great relationship.

Tyler Horning: Yes, customer retention and happiness.

Joe Toste: Yeah.

Joe Toste: There's a KPI. Yeah. Yeah, no, this is fantastic. I love this. As we start to close out Tyler, if you could give one piece of advice to one of Kathy's students who are in the program, what advice would you give to them as a, as they're an kind of up and coming college student?

Tyler Horning: That is a tricky question, right?

Tyler Horning: It's absorb as much as you can, really understand what your peers and what the infrastructure or not the infrastructure, but the organization is doing and how they're doing it. And, get a little bit broader view. It'll, it's a life lesson that'll, they'll be able to take [00:23:00] with them even outside of helpdesk or anything else.

Tyler Horning: It's a good thing to learn and understand the flow and understand, where you spend your time and how you resolve things and understanding other people's problems and then, being able to help them do that. But be, training students and helping them and finding a path for them, that's amazing.

Tyler Horning: Many university students don't have that and that's a

Joe Toste: great thing. I love that. Kathy, same question. What advice would you give to one of the students that's going through the program right now?

Kathy Hausmann: Actually I'd like to expand that, any student should look at working in IT.

Kathy Hausmann: Because those skills are You can take them anywhere. You take an education major And have them work at the help desk, and they're learning troubleshooting, customer support, things like that, that they're going to encounter in a classroom. Nursing majors. I love hiring nursing majors. They're learning troubleshooting while they're going through school.

Kathy Hausmann: This is a different application, but it's the same thought [00:24:00] process. I have

Tyler Horning: Collect symptoms and formulate a result.

Kathy Hausmann: Our math and computer science students, our dual degree engineering students. Again, it's that path of, doing the programming and then actually interacting with the customer on the other end to see how what you're programming is affecting people.

Kathy Hausmann: What is that process? Seeing all of it. It's a great job for any student in any discipline. And I'm speaking from experience. I worked in IT as a student and I'm a philosophy major.

Joe Toste: That's a great story. Thank you for coming on the public sector show by tech tables. I know it was super last minute but it was still fun hanging out with the two of you. And I had a ton of fun. It was fun. Looking forward to releasing this. And one of my favorite things to do is whenever I'm traveling to whatever.

Joe Toste: Certain cities I go to every year. I would love to visit. Last year I last year I threw an event at the University of Texas here, San Antonio. And I got to visit the student, the SOC and everything. But [00:25:00] yeah if I'm in town, I would love to, I'd love to see the students, love to visit the help desk.

Kathy Hausmann: We'd love to have you.

Joe Toste: Oh, I love it. Awesome. Yeah. If you make it to Omaha for Brookshire, I'll walk you around Omaha, show you all the spots. Yeah, take me to that McDonald's with with Warren. And yeah, that'd be great. Thank you for coming on the show. Really appreciate you both.

Tyler Horning: Thank

Kathy Hausmann: you.

Joe Toste: Thank you. Appreciate it, Joe.

Hey, what's up everybody? This is Joe Tossi from tech tables.com, and you're listening to the Public Sector Show by Tech Tables. This podcast features human-centric stories from public sectors, CIOs, CISOs, and technology leaders across federal, state, city, county, and higher education. You'll gain valuable insights and current issues and challenges faced by top leaders through interviews, speaking engagements, live podcast tour events.

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