This award goes to an extraordinary Slack champion who drove change, alignment and companywide adoption.
Dell’s Karl Owen is receiving the Slack Champion of the Year Award for being an essential part of helping employees adopt and unlock the value of Slack—because change is easier with the support of a trusted colleague.
Using his passion and position to advocate for Slack growth to increase collaboration throughout Dell, Owen was instrumental in defining the app and integration strategy within the company. This includes partnering on a Slack playbook for Dell team members and emceeing a digital town hall for all Slack users at Dell.
Owen acted as the primary coordinator of the Dell Champions network, a group of 100 teammates who develop custom scripts and apps that run in Slack. He has worked to streamline the security approvals process and was indispensable in cultivating this community.
To more efficiently manage 24/7 internal global engineering support, Dell Storage employees turned to Owen, who helped them create a Slack workflow that allows them to monitor and swarm questions. This both accelerates the support process and reduces email clutter for the support team.
Owen also spearheaded the creation of “BuildBot” to coordinate the building, testing and release of large software projects across a global team of more than 50 engineers. The release management assistant reduced the build lifecycle by half and led to a 10-fold reduction in time to be notified of bugs in software builds—which means resolutions can now be reached in minutes as opposed to hours.
“Software development is a team sport, and Slack enables us to quickly collaborate and increase our velocity of delivery,” Owen says. “We get to have fun while getting work done.”
