Opening context
Osaic operates one of the largest independent wealth management platforms in the United States, supporting thousands of financial advisors and the internal teams who serve them. Technology is not peripheral to that model — it is the medium through which advisors serve clients, satisfy compliance requirements, and run their businesses.
The organization had approximately 2,000 employees distributed across twelve US locations, from California to New Jersey, operating in a hybrid environment with more staff working from home than from the office. A series of recent acquisitions had added further complexity — different firms, different histories, different operating conditions, all arriving in the same IT picture.
The situation
The VP of Workplace Technology owned email, collaboration, laptops, printing, and the service desk. Operational metrics existed for each. What those metrics could not produce was a view of how IT was actually landing across different populations — which locations were absorbing friction without raising tickets, which service areas were performing well enough to leave alone, and whether the problems showing up in the data were systemic or local.
He had spent four years at Advisor Group knowing the gap existed. At a previous organization, he had run a manual equivalent at scale: 600 people interviewed across 25 business groups, a team of project managers coordinating monthly, months of analysis before findings could be acted on. The information had been valuable. The process was not repeatable without that infrastructure.
“It gave me the data to tell a story. It allowed me to show a broad view, or zoom in and provide a very narrow scope — by location, by region, by role. What’s working well, what isn’t, what needs improvement.”
— Todd Logan, VP Workplace Technology, Osaic
Roughly 80% of IT friction never becomes a ticket. The picture that service desk data produced was accurate for what it measured. It could not show what wasn’t being reported, or confirm whether the distribution of problems was concentrated or diffuse. Without that distinction, investment decisions were constrained to what was already visible — and building a case for anything beyond the obvious required evidence that didn’t yet exist.
What the independent record showed
Almost 800 employees across Osaic’s locations completed the assessment — a 46% participation rate. The results were segmented by role, business unit, and location, producing a record that operational systems had not been designed to create.
The themes from employee comments were direct: laptops were too slow, battery life wasn’t lasting, remote troubleshooting had become harder as the workforce shifted to hybrid. Tickets for services and patching were recurring friction points. Education and training gaps were visible across multiple groups.
Two service areas emerged as the highest priorities — both with significant influence over daily productivity, both with the most room to close. A third, Video Conferencing, told a different story: consistently well-rated across most of the business, and not a priority to change.
The variation by role and business unit was sharp. Some functions were operating with strong IT foundations. Others — including the largest employee group in the enterprise — were carrying friction that wasn’t reaching the service desk. The geographic segmentation added a further layer: locations that had come through recent acquisitions showed concentrated patterns of friction that operational data had not surfaced.
The record confirmed the suspicion — and gave it a geography.
What changed
The service desk was funded. The service desk was the highest-influence priority in the enterprise — clearly under-resourced relative to the demand the record showed. Two new service desk hires were funded directly from that evidence.
1 in 4 laptops were replaced. The employee comments were unambiguous: laptops were too slow, battery life wasn’t lasting. Desktop monitoring later confirmed it — battery lifespan had degraded to approximately 25% in the affected groups. Combined with industry benchmarks, the record produced a three-source case that held. 450 laptops were replaced, prioritized to the most affected groups first. And the standard for every laptop that followed was raised.
Patching friction was addressed. The record surfaced patching as a recurring employee concern. A new Microsoft update service was tested to give the IT team greater control over when updates were applied — directly addressing a source of disruption that had been visible in the comments but not previously prioritized.
Training gaps were closed at source. The record surfaced friction with collaboration and productivity tools that wasn’t producing tickets. An internal site was updated with training content and new ways for employees to interact with the ETS team throughout the year. Targeted webinars were delivered in conjunction with internal engineers and the relevant software provider. The training response was informed by the record, not by assumption about where users were struggling.
Closing line
The investment case held. The distinction between systemic and local had been established on evidence — and the decisions that followed were ones that executives could not reasonably dispute.
“It was like a 1-2-3 punch — the Voxxify results, our desktop monitoring results, and then industry-wide results using Gartner analysis. And that was the nail in the coffin. It was like: okay, you’ve made your argument.”
— Todd Logan, VP Workplace Technology, Osaic
