Support's Man Behind the Scenes

By Blair Campbell

Alex van Dijk makes sure it's "all systems go" in Oracle's global-support group.

When a massive earthquake wreaked havoc in Algeria last spring, the damage on land was obvious, as firefighters rushed to rescue survivors and international aid organizations flew in relief supplies. But below the sea off the coast of the North African nation, the earthquake did some invisible damage as well, severing a major underwater cable and knocking out the Oracle Support Service's (OSS) connectivity to its operations in India.

As soon as word of the disruption reached the OSS's Alex van Dijk, in Oracle's Orlando, Florida, support facility, he and his team began working with Oracle's corporate IT department, various global telecom vendors, and the OSS's business-continuity-process team to design alternatives for restoring service. They ultimately rerouted the lost connections via satellite link and landlines within 24 hours, keeping all support systems up and running with this interim solution until they were able to restore full capacity a few days later.

Global solutions seem to come naturally to van Dijk, who was born in Argentina to Dutch immigrant parents, has dual Dutch-Argentine citizenship, and spent his youth in Paraguay, Venezuela, Singapore, and Malaysia. Along with his multicultural, multilingual outlook, says van Dijk, his martial-arts background (he has a black belt in karate) has also contributed to his effectiveness at work.

"I know there's more than one way to look at things, and I don't need to see the other person lose to feel I've succeeded," says van Dijk. "In martial arts, we have a paradox: We practice violence to avoid putting it into practice. When you have confidence and an open mind, you don't need to prove anything."

It's only fitting that this man of the world brings his international passions to his professional life as well, and that's just what van Dijk's done since 1989, as he's moved up the ranks in an organization determined to enhance its global presence. Van Dijk is quick to add that his team deserves much of the credit for his group's successes; he has the privilege of managing them, but they do most of the work, he emphasizes.

Apparently, that work—and other efforts throughout the support organization—are paying off: The OSS was awarded the 2003 "Stevie Award" for best support organization by the American Business Awards and the year's WebSTAR Service Award from the Service and Support Professionals Association.

A recent effort at benchmarking also revealed that the OSS is leading the industry not only in its efforts to go global but also in its transition from telephony-based support to Web-based service. Of the approximately 1 million service requests the OSS receives per year, about 90 percent are now being submitted online—a figure that's up from 10 percent in 2000.

"As we move forward, we're not just changing from being phone based to being Web based and therefore more efficient," says van Dijk. "We're also going from being reactive, where we just sit and wait for a call, to being very proactive." One example of this approach is the OSS's searchable knowledge base—a feature some 80 million users have employed since its inception, dramatically reducing the volume of service requests and bringing customer satisfaction to an all-time high.

Such efforts at streamlining online support mirror Oracle's broader effort to make its international-support organizations more efficient. In fact, global consolidation has been the key element of one of van Dijk's biggest undertakings to date: the centralization of Latin American support. Until recently, the OSS presence in Latin America consisted of 10 offices in different countries, with an average of about 10 people per location.

"We decided that consolidating into one location [in Orlando], where 100 people could work together and share knowledge, would be much more efficient," says van Dijk. He adds that the goals of this initiative are indicative of Oracle's plan to centralize support globally—with the aim of giving all users, regardless of their location, a uniformly positive experience with the OSS.

"Whether they call from France or Latin America or the U.S.," says van Dijk, "our customers should get the same high-quality service."