Susan Watts
Susan is an IT Professional with a background in technology, business administration, project management, and process improvement. She has approximately twenty years of experience in both the academic and corporate sectors.
Prior to joining the EPS team at Syracuse University, Susan worked as an IT Manager in several different capacities during a 10 year career at Carrier Corporation and has since been at Syracuse University since 1999. Her IT management experience spans the range of Global Help Desk Manager, Operations Manager, Problem Resolution Group Manager, and IT Infrastructure Manager. Susan also held the position of Project Manager at Carrier Corporation while working on projects that affected all divisions within North America. In each of the above endeavors, Susan implemented various process improvement techniques and methodologies improving service and support within the respective organizations.
At Syracuse University, Susan developed and introduced the first formal change management procedure which was adopted by all of ITS. She also implemented and maintained a root-cause-analysis program for all service outages; 7x24x365 emergency phone supports that is still in use by ITS staff today; and a streamlined equipment disposal procedure for removal of data center equipment that resulted in a significant reduction of person hours for data center equipment disposal. Most recently at SU, Susan has taken on the role of a Process Manager in the Enterprise Process Support (EPS) group where she has been instrumental in rolling out TeamDynamix, an ITS wide project and portfolio management tool. TeamDynamix has allowed the entire department to standardize on a single tool for capturing demand for work, allocation of staff, prioritization of the work, and time reporting.
At Carrier Corporation Susan improved the effectiveness of the world-class global Help Desk by developing and implementing a technology specific dual-tier support structure. She enhanced the support structure by implementing Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for a common customer incident channel. She also worked as a member on a team that proactively investigated IT processes across North America, and recommended programs aimed at reducing complexity. This initiative resulted in a savings of about $1.1M annually in costs for North American IT support.
Some of Susan’s interests include utilizing industry standard best practice process improvements for increasing quality, efficiency, and organizational consistency, and in “telling the stories” associated with process improvement through metrics.
Susan is the President of the OrangeOrators Toastmasters club at Syracuse University. She holds a degree in Computer Science from OCC where she was awarded with the Computer Science Honor Award, and a Bachelors Degree in Business Administration from Columbia College.
Updated: 12/2/2008