Podcast
Frank McAloon, VP of digital workplace and security delivery at CVS Health joins Get Reworked to discuss the cross-departmental coalition he built to improve the digital employee experience for their 300,000 colleagues. By moving these IT tasks under a bigger umbrella of leaders, he's connecting IT efforts to business results and speeding time to resolution.
Listen: Get Reworked Full Episode List
"Overall, the success that we're trying to have with the XMO is to reduce stress on our colleagues, making them more productive, making sure they are more streamlined in what they're doing and ultimately helping our clients and customers across everyone that works with CVS. The happier our colleagues can be and the more efficient they can be, the better it is for everyone," said Frank.
Highlights of the conversation include:
- How he and the XMO office approach prioritization in an organization with more than 300,000 employees.
- How CVS Health is using AI to identify potential problem areas for colleagues.
- Why Frank sees a future where IT help desks are no longer needed.
Tune-in Here
 |  |
Show Notes
- Frank McAloon on LinkedIn
Show Transcript
Note: This conversation has been edited for clarity.
Frank McAloon: Most of the time when you call a help desk, you sit on the phone for a while and it can take a lot of time depending on what the situation is. Overall, we're hoping to eliminate the need for a lot of those calls to the help desk. Whether it's these pieces that we can help fix where someone's issues get fixed before it even happens.
Siobhan Fagan: Imagine never having to file a support ticket again. What would your working day look like if you never had to update software before joining a meeting or your memory automatically upgraded before you tapped it out?
It sounds pretty magical, no?
And that’s exactly the kind of magic Frank McAloon is trying to create at CVS Health. Frank is vice president, digital workplace and security delivery at CVS Health and in that role, he is striving to improve the digital experience of the 300,000 colleagues he and his team serve.
One of the ways they’re doing that is with a proprietary tool they’ve built called Excalibur. Only in this case it’s not a lady in a lake handing over the sword, it’s the data in their data lake allowing them to proactively take care of issues before employees are even aware they exist.
Let’s bring Frank on to hear more about the work he’s doing at CVS Health.
Welcome to Get Reworked Frank!
Frank: Thank you, Siobhan. Nice to be here.
An Introduction to CVS Health's Experience Management Office
Siobhan: Let's start off by setting base-level expectations here. Give us a sense of how many employees you are actually supporting in your role and all of the different varieties of employees that you support.
Frank: Absolutely. It goes back where when everyone looks at CVS, they think of the retail store. And I always say, well, it's a little bit more complicated than that. We have around 300,000 colleagues. We range from such things as we own a PBM [pharmacy benefit manager] that's called Caremark, an insurance company, which is Aetna. That is our healthcare benefits side.
We have all of our retail stores, our pharmacies. We've had some recent acquisitions with our healthcare delivery, which is Oak Street Health and Signify, and even announced a new business called HealthSpire that's going to enable our delivered connected patient care and pharmacy benefits to our customers. we support from my organization all 300 ,000 colleagues.
Siobhan: When you and I discussed this episode, you mentioned an initiative that you started at CVS Health. I'd really like to jump into it — it's called the Experience Management Office. Can you give us an overview of what this Experience Management Office does?
Frank: I would love to. At CVS, I work in an organization called D-DAT. It's an acronym for Digital Data Technology and Analytics. And within that organization, I work in the infrastructure side of the house and we work with, again, the 300,000 colleagues in the organization. We want to make sure we're able to support them all.
When we built this experience management office — we call the XMO — what we were looking to initially do was we started this process improvement program called Are You Kidding Me? And this spread across the organization, where people would have your 'are you kidding me' moment. And they would be able to tell us, hey, I'm having an are you kidding me moment and this is what I would love to have fixed and looked at. It was extremely successful.
We wanted to take it a step further. What we do in the experience manager office, we're looking to enhance the productivity and satisfaction of our colleagues by implementing a data-driven approach to resolve these digital challenges, that improves the colleague experience and accelerates the delivery of value to our business.
What we wanted to start with was build a governance model to define the decision-making authority — all the roles and responsibilities and support cross-function partnering in their organization. We also had to figure out how to measure it. So we created digital experience scorecards so we can constantly make sure we're making improvements and create a backlog of all the work that people look into help improve and fix and create launch calendars. So our experience studio can be engaged and realize the largest business value.
'Are You Kidding Me?'
Siobhan: I love the 'are you kidding me moments' and I definitely get the sense of it from the term, but could you give us a few examples of what a stereotypical 'are you kidding me' moment would be?
Frank: One of the great ones, and this is one we also focused on with the experienced manager office, was our onboarding. Our onboarding has always had some issues. It is very complicated depending on, again, lots of parts of the business that has to make it happen. It's just one problem. Things that colleagues would come back and say is, are you kidding me? my person that I've hired hasn't had access for a day. They can't access these tools.
Conference
Oct
20
Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Conference
Oct
27
Gartner HR Symposium/Xpo Orlando 2025
Register
Those are the type of issues that we'll have and they range from anything from my laptop keeps shutting off on me whenever I upload Teams or I can't get my colleague onboarded properly when I need to or these forms are just terrible when we work through them. So it runs the gamut of all the things we can help fix.
A Cross-Departmental Collaboration
Siobhan: I think there's going to be a lot of employees at other organizations being like, I need one of those in company — you might provoke some copycats out there. So when we look at the Experience Management Office, who's involved? You said that you're part of D-DAT, but do other departments participate? Is it a cross-departmental collaboration? How does this look?
Frank: Absolutely. So the XMO isn't just a D-DAT IT thing. It's a collaborative effort. It includes experts from technology teams, all of our business partners, depending on what we're referring to, shared services. Overall, the team's designed to bring together diverse perspectives to improve our digital experience. So depending on what the topic actually is, it'll range and we'll pull in people as we go. So there's a steering committee and the governance council that will help.
Siobhan: And where does it fit within the organization? You said it's not only D-DAT, so who are you answering up to?
Frank: The XMO operates with a high-level of integration and reports to that governance committee. So it's not as high as our C-suite folks, but we do have some more senior level VPs, SVPs across the organization that we report up to and talk through. We want to make sure the initiatives align with our CVS Health's broader goals. So this structure helps us stay connected to the larger organizational objectives while focusing on our specific mandate for the XML.
Siobhan: When you look at all of these different requests, I mean, again, the scale, 300,000 employees, how do you prioritize which one? You're saying that you need it to align with the CVS Health goals, obviously, but I imagine that that's a lot of juggling.
Frank: It is. And that's part of what that backlog in the governance group will do. So we're trying to make the largest impacts as we can. Right. So if someone turns around and says we want to fix an issue for this one form and we look at the form and five people have used the form over the last year. OK. Probably not the biggest impact we can make, but something like I'll keep using the onboarding piece. We onboard a very large amount of people as we go, whether it's retail folks or just, your corporate-wide colleagues. So we want to make sure that that can be fixed so we can remove that stress or the are you kidding me moments from what people do on a daily basis. But we address all levels. So whether it's a department-wide change, a team-specific issue, individual needs or location-based concerns, we just look to see where we can make the largest impact.
Siobhan: I imagine that there are also very specific use cases depending on which area of the company that you're dealing with. So you're going to have to kind of further subdivisions according to that.
If we look at, and I know this is probably impossible, but if we look at what a typical day in the XMO is, what would this look like?
Employee Response to the XMO
Frank: There's never a typical day, so I would say it revolves more around looking at incoming issues that we take in our process, prioritizing based on impact, like I mentioned, and coordinating with various teams to help address them. So our day also includes analyzing data to uncover potential improvements, making sure that we're not just reacting to problems, but proactively preventing them as best as we can. We also have a proactive SWAT team that does proactive outreach. So they contact executives and colleagues proactively replacing things like PCs and upgrading colleagues when things are necessary.
Siobhan: I just got this visual of a team dropping down in my home office with a new laptop and being like, 'Siobhan, you need this now.'
Frank: That's the goal.
Siobhan: How long has the XMO been active?
Frank: The XMO started rolling out earlier this spring. So we've done a few different things that we're trying to streamline, make sure it's running through a proof of concept. And now we're rolling it out, like I said, since the spring timeframe. And now we're gonna be expanding across the organization to do more for us.
Siobhan: What has the response been so far in these pilots that you've run?
Frank: Extremely positive. Colleagues have looked at it as the great enhancements that we're making. Overall, the success that we're trying to have with the XMO is to reduce stress on our colleagues, making them more productive, making sure they are more streamlined in what they're doing and ultimately helping our clients and customers across everyone that works with CVS. The happier our colleagues can be and the more efficient they can be, the better it is for everyone.
Siobhan: Have you had to adjust anything since rolling out this pilot? Have you had to rethink an approach that you thought 'this is going to be a winner' and then had to dial it back because it didn't work?
Frank: Of course. We've all encountered that and that's why we did the proof of concept to make sure of it. But the biggest challenge we encountered was more around the structured intake process. When we initially got it, there was just a whole bunch of information thrown at us. And it was like you mentioned, right? Hard to not only prioritize, but just to read through it and make sure we're focused on the right things.
We're not looking for people to say, 'I'm having an HR issue.' That's not something we're looking to fix in the experience management office, that would go to the HR group. So we're taking that influx of requests, reviewing them and making sure it's those critical issues that we're focusing on. That was the biggest lesson learned is to make sure what we can do to focus on the right thing.
Excalibur Taps CVS Health Data to Proactively Improve DEX
Siobhan: When you mentioned the swat team, is that part of Excalibur?
Frank: It is. Excalibur is something I'm super excited about. The way you can look at it, Excalibur is a data-driven initiative aimed at improving IT experiences for our colleagues. Excalibur is named after, of course, the legendary King Arthur sword that possesses magical powers and was thrown into a lake. So ultimately what Excalibur is, it's our magical solution, where it's a data lake and we're taking all the tools we use that give us all this different data and throwing it in this large data lake and we're extracting all that data to see what we can do to get insights that guide our strategy and improve how we address IT issues.
Siobhan: Is Excalibur a proprietary tool? As in, is this something that you built from scratch?
Frank: Yes, it's something we've built and we're improving on as we go. So, you know, we started with taking all the data and we have dashboards and we're delivering these dashboards to the needed people where they can use them immediately when things are needed because it's real time data and they can address issues when the thing when certain situations happen. But, you know, we want to keep building it out. We want to keep making use of the data as much as we can.
Siobhan: And so is it on the same rollout map or schedule as the XMO or is it following a little bit behind? How do the two work in alignment?
Frank: So we kicked off the pilot for Excalibur in May of 2024 and we're currently in that testing phase. We're analyzing the data and its impact and preparing for broader rollout based on the lessons learned from what we have. Our goal is to ensure that we can expand it so it's a well-planned and impactful rollout.
How AI Supports Digital Employee Experience Efforts
Siobhan: I know your personal interest in AI and the great potential you see for AI's application in the workplace. So I assume there is some of that with this data extraction and data reading. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you see that working? And knowing your security background, how you balance those two sides?
Frank: Absolutely. So, like I mentioned, we're looking to expand out these dashboards, looking to expand out the data capabilities to support all of our business across the organization. So let's just say the next step is using machine learning to predict and isolate complex issues and AI to create auto-tickets when an issue is identified.
A good example of what we want the data to realize and look at and go — let's say someone's having an issue with memory issues on their laptop. We want to be able to create auto-tickets that then go into a tool like ServiceNow or it goes to our help desk or it goes to our folks that will actually make those fixes for you. And it's not something you need to do. In the future, ultimately, I want to look at it like, Spider-Man. So Spider-Man has his spider senses, right? And his spider senses are tingling when something's about to happen. We want to provide those kinds of predictive insights. And we want the data to come up with that spider sense that can help predict certain situations with our colleagues before they happen. So we want to be proactively addressing potential issues. The aim is to enhance the overall digital experience for our colleagues before the problems arise.
An examples of that is, we could look at it and go, well, it looks like we're having Wi-Fi issues in certain areas. Some people are spiking. Maybe something happened in one part of the building where we have that. That's something we can address and that's a little bit more reactive, but we can actually start looking at things where we see them ahead of time. The data can look at it and give us a threshold to say, 'Hey, certain people are having problems and it's growing, jump on it right away.' And then hopefully we can go out there and either fix those issues before they happen or before they get bigger, or just address them so we realize what's happening. And this could be something that's happening internally or, depending on the partners we work with, externally.
Siobhan: I have to ask because everybody knows about the AI hallucinations. Is there any concern around that in this case where it would like send out a, 'Hey, this is going wrong in your system' that's wrong? What are you doing around that?
Frank: Yes, of course we've got to watch for that. So that's one of the pieces we're working on as we do this. There will be some false positives. There will be some hallucinations depending on what happens. Once we get smarter, just like any AI, we'll be able to reduce those and hopefully eliminate them as we go. But the one thing you mentioned around security is security is also a huge piece. We want to make sure that everything we do is secure.
So we do have, going back to the XMO, security dashboards that we're creating to make sure we have the right security experience and also making sure that we have the data looking at some of the security features so we have the same kind of addressing that we're doing within the organization.
The Future State: No More Help Desks?
Siobhan: Where do you ideally hope to see this going? I know you said Spider-Man, but what's the ideal? Is it no more help tickets ever again? No more are you kidding me? What's the end goal?
Frank: We're doing a lot to make sure that we help our colleagues. Help desk are always great. But I know most of the time when you call a help desk, you sit on the phone for a while and it can take a lot of time depending on what the situation is. Overall, we're hoping to eliminate the need for a lot of those calls to the help desk. Whether it's these pieces that we can help fix where someone's issues get fixed before it even happens.
So ultimately we want to do two different things. One is stop a lot of those calls. So that doesn't inconvenience colleagues where they don't have to call the help desk.
And then, where we're going is to fix them before a colleague even knows. We want to be able to proactively identify the issues where we can go, great, you didn't even know we have this issue. You're having this hit this button — we're going to update it for you. Or tonight it will refresh your system. So we'll fix that. So ultimately, it's just allowing our colleagues to not have to worry about IT issues and just focus on the work that they have.
Siobhan: That’s where the magic of Excalibur comes in.
Frank: Correct.
Advice for Other Digital Workplace Leads
Siobhan: For an organization that perhaps is not at the same scale as yours, if they were interested in starting an XMO or an equivalent baby-XMO, what advice would you give them to get started, get the C-Suite buy-in, etc.
Frank: So one of the things we did is we took, so Gartner Research does an assessment of where your company's at with a digital workplace. So I'd recommend taking that first. Looking to see where you fall in that assessment. It goes, I think it's one through four is what it comes down to. And most everyone's at like a three or a two or little people are at a three. We were at a beginnings of the three before all this. I think there are steps you have to take, or I would say you should take before you start that XMO group.
But once you do, this is more enabling the business. Instead of being order takers, this is actually building that up where you're enabling the success of the business and what that works out. So a lot of it comes down to, work through to see what you can do to collect the issues that you have within your organization and show that business case, to show if we can fix this is just a small grouping of the issues that the company has and we can get this XMO involved where we can understand the experience across the organization with these small subset of issues that we have. We think that would be the best place to start and it would show you know this is the business case of what can be successful and where you can go.
Siobhan: I really appreciate you taking this time and am even more aware of you taking this time because you're supporting 300,000 employees. But do you have any final words of advice or anything that we didn't cover that you'd like to share with the audience?
Frank: All I can say is that I want to keep pushing the envelope. I think we're just at such an awesome time with technology. So this is the time to do whatever we can. Here at CVS, we're a tech-forward healthcare company and we're trying to do what we can to keep that going and let our colleagues focus on what's really important to our customers and clients. But otherwise, no, I appreciate the time with you. This was fantastic.
Siobhan: I really enjoyed talking to you, Frank. Thanks so much for joining me.
Frank: Thank you.
Siobhan: Thanks to you, the listeners, for joining me. If you liked what you heard, please share Get Reworked with anyone you think might benefit from these types of conversations — word of mouth marketing is the best marketing anyone could ask for. And check out our coverage of this and related topics on reworked.co. Thanks again for exploring the changing world of work with me, and I'll see you next time.