Providence College graduate Deb Ricci has been Carousel Industries’ business-readiness champion for over a year now, in the information technology field overall for 45 years. One of her core responsibilities is ensuring team members are prepared for change. She is a member of Tech Collective’s Women in Tech committee.
PBN: In your position at Carousel, you help guide team members through organizational changes. What has that entailed over the past few years in regard to technological tools?
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RICCI: We realized our employees need the best tools to perform to our clients’ expectations. Carousel has invested in monitoring tools and has engaged in a relationship with a company in India to help us reduce the amount of noise our technical staff experiences. The goal is to … enhance our employees’ experiences through these tools.
We are using ServiceNow [information technology service management] software for managing [information technology infrastructure library] processes to help us process clients’ service requests and alerts more efficiently and effectively. The agility of our newer tools helps us address the complexity of our clients’ environments, allowing us to be more proactive in our support. Carousel has held many training sessions and webinars to help our employees transition to the changes.
PBN: Does the fact that Carousel makes its own changes in regard to technology help it better serve its clients, who are making similar transitions?
RICCI: We support many different areas of technology – such as voice, video, data and wireless. We represent a variety of manufacturers as a product reseller and offer ongoing support for their products. The ITSM system and the alert monitoring tools are paramount in alleviating the day-to-day worries of our clients as we assume the ownership of managing their alerts and alarms. Clients look to Carousel to offer the support they need to help them address the strategic needs of their business.
PBN: You participate in Women in Tech, Tech Collective’s mentorship program for women. What have you learned about the industry through that experience?
RICCI: Many of the Rhode Island companies are in businesses outside of IT, yet IT is fundamental to their success. These companies may have only a few people on the IT staff and their need to share experiences and what is happening in IT within other businesses is crucial to building an internally strong IT infrastructure.
Many of these women have no established role models to help them achieve their goals. We need to co-mentor between men and women to reach a goal of transcending gender in IT. We need to understand how men think about issues relating to IT and women need to think about how men think about the same issues … IT serves both genders as customers.
PBN: What are some main themes in IT training right now?
RICCI: Customer service skills are in high demand. We have many students who leave our colleges, universities and technical certification programs that may not have strong interpersonal soft skills. In addition, Carousel works with Workforce RI to assist in the transitioning of people who have been unemployed or underemployed greater than six months into technical roles.
Technology is not stagnant. … Our employees must stay abreast of what is new in the market, what are customers are demanding and at the same time, they need to stay current on existing technologies. Cloud technology and cybersecurity/security are the latest focus within our industry.
PBN: Does workforce readiness nowadays involve being forward-thinking more than it ever has?
RICCI: The rate of accelerated change has increased over the years. Knowledge of technology and its application for our customers’ use is and has been forever evolving. The complexity within our industry is vexing and challenging.
It is important to learn the basic foundations and grow the knowledge from there, as this technological knowledge helps transcend products. I encourage our staff and the Women in Tech mentorship program to care for themselves by striving to take advantage of many trainings presented to them. Innovation and agility are important to workforce readiness.
Susan Shalhoub is a PBN contributing writer.
