Opening context
Cloudera is a global data cloud platform with 2,700 employees across North America, Europe, and Asia — a technically demanding workforce spread across regions and time zones, many of them without a local IT presence.
When Dohsung Yum joined as CIO, one of his first priorities was establishing a reliable, organization-wide picture of how IT was genuinely performing from the perspective of the people using it.
Existing tools — HR platforms, ITSM survey tools — were not built for that purpose. They lacked the domain specificity, the benchmarking capability, and the deployment expertise that an IT-focused independent record requires.
Six months in, Yum made a different call. The results exceeded his expectations.
The situation
Not everyone on Yum’s team was immediately comfortable with the idea. In an IT organization that knew its own shortcomings, the prospect of surfacing them formally felt like risk. Yum’s response was to reframe it.
The record was not a report card on his team. It was a service record — a picture of where IT was landing well and where it wasn’t, from the only source that could provide it: the people doing the work. And in his experience, that picture carried more positive feedback than teams ever expected.
Yum’s own assessment going in was pragmatic. He wondered openly whether the value would justify the investment. His verdict after the first run was equally direct: Voxxify exceeded his expectations.
“If I’d done this in month one as CIO, it would have fundamentally shifted my approach to the entire first year.”
— Dohsung Yum, CIO, Cloudera
The stakes of not having an independent baseline were specific. A service issue Yum believed had been resolved turned out still to be affecting his people. Not because the team had misled him — but because no internal picture, however well-intentioned, can fully replace an independent one. What it showed, internal reporting could not.
What the independent record showed
Voxxify was deployed across Cloudera’s global workforce — North America, EMEA, and APAC. Employees had already received three other surveys in the preceding three months — HR engagement, compliance training, and DEI — with mandatory training running concurrently. Even so, the response rate was 43%, with over 1,700 comments submitted.
The record surfaced a dashboard service that had not been on Yum’s radar as a priority. For the team member responsible, it provided something equally valuable: the independent picture that gave Yum what he needed to direct support where it was actually needed. Naming the issue was the first step to fixing it. Within weeks of closing, each IT leader had a detailed action plan grounded in what the data had shown.
What Voxxify surfaced gave Yum something internal reporting could not: a reference point independent of the people whose budgets and reputations were tied to what it showed. No analyst. No synthesis delay. Results were available within 10 minutes of closing.
Olivia Keenaghan, Cloudera’s Senior Director of Enterprise Technology, joined the first readout call expecting to discuss when the results would be ready. They were already there.
“I came to the first readout expecting to talk about timelines. The results were already there. I didn’t expect that at all.”
— Olivia Keenaghan, Senior Director of Enterprise Technology, Cloudera
What changed
The priority redirect was immediate and constructive. A service area not previously flagged became a named action. A service believed to be resolved was identified and addressed. The team that had been nervous about what the evidence might surface found something they had not expected: proof of what they were doing well, and a clear mandate for what to work on next.
Yum’s internal ambition for the IT function had a name: One IT. A distributed team, operating across regions and time zones, aligned around a single picture of how IT was landing. The record became the foundation for that alignment — not a document to present at a leadership meeting, but a shared reference that every service owner could see and act on.
“If I could change one thing, I would have worked with Voxxify even earlier. It gave me confidence that we’re focusing on what matters most.”
— Dohsung Yum, CIO, Cloudera
The outcome
Between Round 1 and Round 2, every service category tracked moved in the same direction. Overall satisfaction improved 10% across Cloudera’s global IT function in twelve months.
The dashboard service that Round 1 had surfaced as the lowest-rated area in the organization improved 13% by Round 2. The number of employees citing Tableau performance as a specific frustration more than halved. The service Yum had not known was his biggest problem became a named priority, a set of action plans, and a measurable improvement — in the same annual cycle.
Training & Enablement showed the largest movement of any service category, up 19%. The record had named it. The team had acted on it.
For a new CIO, the question is not whether to establish the independent record. It is how long to wait before doing it.
