A South Korean IT services provider with more than 30 years of experience innovating within the industry, SK C&C is receiving Slack’s Unlocking Productivity Award – South Korea for using the productivity platform to automate tasks and manage high-touch service operations, including incident monitoring and response and customer enquiry management.
SK C&C maximises customer value by constructing and operating hybrid clouds, overseeing IT programmes and lending its technological expertise in digital transformation to various customer industries, including manufacturing, finance, telecommunications and services. Working closely with global partner companies who already used Slack encouraged SK C&C to adopt it themselves. The company integrated Slack in 2015 to enable engagement from anywhere, and its more than 1,100 employees now use over 200 Slack channels to get work done.
The Hybrid Cloud2 Group, which acts as a managed service provider within SK C&C, has been particularly influential in facilitating the adoption of Slack throughout all of SK Group’s companies. In the past, Hybrid Cloud2 used disparate email and messaging services, which made collaboration difficult. Often working on-site with customers, they now stay connected via Slack, meticulously responding to issues as they occur and connecting the dots between customers, dispatched employees and headquarters. Managers can easily distribute real-time monitoring results, identify the scope of any issues and then share critical information about cause analysis and next steps. By moving everything into Slack, they’ve significantly reduced their team’s workload and increased efficiency so that they can focus on the most significant issues.
‘Slack has become an indispensable tool for effectively managing the entire systems operations process, from identifying the root cause of a problem and tracking its impact and scope, to taking necessary actions.’
Young-Deok Lim manages SK C&C’s Life/Service Cloud team, which uses Slack to oversee shared infrastructure systems for various SK affiliates, including SK Networks, SK Innovation and SKC. The team is responsible for the operation and management of a comprehensive cloud environment encompassing all components necessary for application development and execution – servers, operating systems, networking, storage and middleware.
‘In system operations, unexpected issues or failures can frequently occur,’ Young-Deok Lim says. ‘In such critical situations, Slack truly excels. Recently, when an issue occurred in the system, I promptly shared the situation with the operation managers of the application via Slack, enabling us to resolve it efficiently.’
The Life/Service Cloud team also provides operational support for cloud computing such as Kubernetes and container-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) within systems built on cloud service platforms such as AWS and Azure. Colleagues use Slack to communicate work progress and share code results, eliminating the need for face-to-face communication.
‘The introduction of Slack has changed the structural capabilities of our company. Within the managed service provider ecosystem, an automation system serves as a means to reduce costs without compromising revenue. By automating and enhancing cloud services, and quickly responding to technological or environmental changes, we can ultimately deliver enhanced value to our customers. Effectively utilising Slack can be seen as a key factor in gaining a competitive advantage for information and communication technology companies.’
On SK C&C’s Multi-Cloud Management Platform (MCMP), manager Dong-eun Kim is responsible for operating and managing hybrid and multi-cloud services. To reduce context switching and find efficiencies, the team taps into Slack’s extensive application library. For example, they monitor the MCMP governance service through Datadog, which sends relevant alerts to dedicated Slack channels. ‘The role of Slack extends beyond that of a typical business messenger and changes the quality of our operational services,’ says Dong-eun Kim. ‘For instance, we recently received an alert from Datadog about a particular service running low on memory. Thanks to Slack, we were able to promptly identify the problem and adjust our work schedule accordingly, preventing any service disruption.’
To prevent unilateral decision-making, SK C&C encourages a ‘consensus culture’ where opinions and ideas are welcome. But because so many workers are on the ground, it was hard to distribute information, especially if certain groups had to miss meetings. Now they can easily adjust schedules using a voting feature in Slack – which results in better decisions for everyone.
Introduced as a service to streamline SK C&C’s culture and communication, Slack now serves as the strategic platform from which the company can stay informed, agile and empowered, delivering the best possible services to its customers from anywhere.
