Intuit CIO says his global IT team uses four popular communication platforms to increase productivity

Brad Smith CEO Intuit

Atticus Tysen became Intuit's chief information officer at a time when the company was expanding at a rapid pace.

He quickly went from managing a North American team to a global IT team spread across multiple countries, as he recalls in "Measure What Matters," a book about goal-setting by venture capitalist John Doerr.

Tysen had been working at Intuit for 11 years before becoming the CIO in 2013 in the midst of multiple changes: The company's products (TurboTax, Quicken, Quick-Books) were becoming cloud-based software platforms open to thousands of third-party apps rather than desktop software, and the company itself was unifying under the Intuit name and going global.

As it grew, Tysen and the Enterprise Business Solutions (EBS) team — which is how Intuit refers to its IT — felt the weight of a decades-old company set in its ways trying to adapt its communication tools.

EBS has four teams in various regions of the US and in regions of Bangalore, and has support teams scattered elsewhere around the world. "People were forced to improvise, with uneven results," because the team didn't have consistent solutions, he said. "Productivity slipped."

Using the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) process also used by companies like Google and Intel, Tysen made his short-term priority to "Deliver awesome end-to-end workforce technology solutions and strategies."

Here were the tools he landed on, and the key results he outlined to help accomplish that goal: