Speaker: Will Allen
Introduce yourself and tell us about your co-op this semester.
Will Allen: For my summer co-op, I did data analysis work for on campus. It Department DTS. DTS uses a tool called service now that generates in instance, for users in instance, track when the users came in what they came in for and other different things depending on what department it gets filtered into. You can use this data to generate reports which can be very helpful for things like knowing when we need more or less staff at the desk, laptop consumption, data school inventory from like half a dozen different laptops and each ones have different parts and components and knowing what's breaking and what we need to order more of is very important. I recently have been helping the admissions office generate a dashboard which is a grouping of reports to help them figure out where people are having trouble in the admissions process and how to plug those holes. I'm Will Allen from the school of Management. Thank you for listening.
While on co-op, what is a project that you've been a part of that has inspired you?
Will Allen: The project that inspired you. Most of my coop was probably the laptop consumption data table. I there's a, there's already a team in place at DTs that is in charge of service now and implementing changes and really optimizing the software. It's, it's a very broad software that you can do almost anything you could imagine. So getting the chance to meet with all everybody in that group pitch ideas say gee what could we add to the software that would help us help students more, be more effective, make sure that we have everything in the right place. And one of the ideas I pitched was our consumption data table where basically when you, when a, a laptop is collected at the front desk for repair, the repair staff can now say within the ticket, this is a 2019 Razor, we replace the motherboard, these are little check boxes, motherboard L CD, whatever part is and the amount that the student was charged. So now when we go back into our system, we can generate a report within service. Now that says on June 20th, how many 2020 Razor LC DS did we replace? And it'll give us that data and then over time it'll show us what laptop they're breaking what parts we need. And maybe it'll help us know when we need to have more or less parts in stock and help us talk with the laptop, um, retailers we work with about what we need.
What have you learned that you will use in your career?
Will Allen: I learned very early on that service now is becoming an industry standard and there are some other very similar Softwares that are becoming quite prevalent in the world. And the more the deeper I get of service now, the more I learn about it, the more connections I make with different kind of software solution companies that understand how to take a problem and put it in one software. I recently spoke with the company at a career fair. Their whole, they're a country company. Their whole gig is they find companies that might have disorganized software and they get everything onto one software package that can all do everything they need to. They, one of the examples II I ran into that. I spoke, I spoke with these guys with length was they found a cooking company who didn't do a very good job, inventorying their stuff or charging customers because everything was on different software and what they did was they put it all onto um I don't remember the name of the software but it's very similar to service now. And now they now they can track all their consumption data, all their charging data, everything from one platform which makes everybody's job easier. And I look forward to seeing where this information can take me.
