Robert Blanchard
High on a mountain in Colorado, a sensor gate to a ski slope at Aspen Snowmass isn’t coming online. It’s early in the morning, before any of the lift attendants are out to fix it from the ground, but from a command center a few clicks away, Robert Blanchard identifies and troubleshoots the problem — all over his morning coffee.
Blanchard and his team handle all of the technology-related problems for Aspen Skiing Co., a four-mountain chain of destination resorts in the remote Rocky Mountains. Running the helpdesk for a destination ski resort isn’t what most people think of when it comes to IT careers, but the busy group of outdoorsmen and women enjoy their indoor-outdoor lifestyle.
Blanchard’s serene morning is a lot less hectic than the break-fix system they ran when he first started, with three people handling 110 computers. “Our ticketing system was pretty new,” said Blanchard, who started on the helpdesk nearly 20 years ago. “It was a piece of software a guy in Colorado Springs was writing, and people would actually edit it and fix bugs while we were in production. We were kind of flying by the seat of our pants.”
As his staff trickles in, Blanchard, now the director of support services for Aspen Skiing Co., assigns out the previous evening’s help-desk tickets and deploys the team into the field, save the person who stays behind to answer the phone. “We try to get everybody rotated out into the field, so it’s not the same person stuck inside all the time. I think that makes us different than a typical help desk, and I think that’s why we have a good retention rate.”
“It’s key to remember work isn’t life — and that’s one of the nice things here at the job,” Blanchard said. “When things slow down, I can send two or three people out skiing for an hour or two.”
Technology on the Mount
“One of the nice things about working for a ski area is that it’s like working for many different businesses,” he said. “You get in a car, drive to a ski area, go up the mountain, make repairs and snowboard back down.”
It’s a nice life, he said, one that started as a temporary adventure and turned into a fulfilling career. He’s seen the company introduce real-time transport protocol (RTP) and a computerized rental system, which tripled the company’s hardware. Fast-forward to today: The resort uses 850 computers and the department has grown to 18 people, with six on the help desk.
“Everything on our mountain is computerized,” Blanchard said. Some software tracks what trails were groomed overnight, how much snow fell and its consistency, while other software communicates with the trail grooming machines, called Snowcats, to track mileage, GPS information, acres per hour, tiller, gas and other usage data. Another program runs the snowmaking guns.
“Somebody can sit at sort of a control desk and tell a certain valve to turn on or off, or how much water to pump to a certain location, how much air to pump to a certain location,” he said. “I don’t know much about it, but apparently that’s critical depending on the temperature. The lines can freeze and explode and then you have water all over the mountain.”
Aspen Snowmass also uses high definition radio frequency identification (RFID) chips in its one-day lift tickets and multiday passes. “They all have a small RF chip in them and there’s a small antenna that winds around inside of the card,” Blanchard said. “When that ticket or pass goes through a gate, the antenna activates the card and the number off the card, checks it against the database and sees what kind of pass it is and what kind of access it has.”
Lift attendants verify the data using a 15-inch, steel-encased computer housed with a small heater. The high-frequency RF chip can also be tied to a credit card so skiers can pay for meals and other resort amenities or add an eighth day of a seven-day pass, for example, without trekking back to the office. Other resorts go a step beyond and use ultra-high frequency chips, tracking people around the mountain and even gamifying the experience. Ski three Double Black Diamonds in Vail, for example, or a certain amount of verticals in a day, and unlock a badge from the resort’s website. Technology is also used to tie in photography and social media and share action shots of skiers — with an invitation to buy, of course.
Running an HDI Certified Team
For the last two years, Blanchard’s team has received the HDI Team Certified Award, meaning at least 80 percent of the help desk was certified by HDI, the worldwide professional association and certification body for the technical service and support industry. Certifications aren’t the first thing he looks for when hiring, but they certainly carry some weight. “If I have two candidates applying for the same job and they both seem to have the other qualities that we’re looking for, the person with the certification is the one who is going to get hired,” he said.
When hiring, he looks for self-confidence, a high level of commitment when troubleshooting and a passion for customer service. His annual budget includes money for training; first to focus on customer service skills and then knowledge and support training. “The A+ certification is always nice to have,” said Blanchard, who holds certifications in HDI Support Center Management, Authorized Personal Engineering, ITIL Foundations and Knowledge Center Support Fundamentals. “I do believe in training and I’ve taken a lot and it has paid off.”
People who join the help desk end up staying because of the positive experience and the chance to play around with fun and interesting new technologies.
“We’re not on the bleeding edge, but we’re on the edge for sure,” he said. “And luckily we have the leadership that believes in it, too. That’s key, that you have people at the top who understand the importance of technology and will put the resources behind it to advance it in the way that you need to — to keep the business running and safe and bringing in money.”
Michelle Peterson is a communications specialist for CompTIA.
