Gone

This morning saw about 450 people across the globe at Imagination Go Google. The project, which has been running since the beginning of September, has been a truly cross-business affair, involving a team of people spread from Sydney through to Los Angeles.
At the outset, the objectives were lofty. Accessible information distributed globally between team members which enables us to do the right things, at the right time, in the right place. The project has always been more than “just a new email system”.
Our starting point was of a set of tools that had been designed for a different sort of company – a far less global organisation, operating primarily from one office. Today, Imagination has an office network that comprises 14 sites in nine countries and seven time zones. Open source email based around IMAP servers and the Thunderbird email client, Oracle Calendar for diary services, no consistent service for managing contacts, no instant messaging, and a hotch-potch of BlackBerry BIS and BES to allow limited access to some of the tools. All of this in an environment where about one-third of the user base are using MacOS, many people are regularly travelling away from the office, and where new offices spring up on a regular basis.
First step was to identify a primary project sponsor – in the end, the European Operations Director. Having the project led by a “business” person rather than an IT person was critical to successful adoption of a new platform. The second step was to pull together a cross-business team of people who would be able to make decisions on behalf of the company. That team involved people at all levels, from most of the offices, is a very global group. Use of tools to help facilitate the team (Webex, and Shareflow) was crucial to allow them to form, norm and perform.
The only technology stipulation that I made in my role in the team was that whatever service we went with had to be delivered as a pure, software-as-a-service proposition. The geographic, 24/7 of the company now is such that it just doesn't make sense to try to run core services in house. The project team pulled together the core business requirements for a new collaboration platform, and Microsoft, IBM Lotus and Google were invited to respond to a request for proposals. IBM are playing catch up, and unfortunately just didn't have a SaaS proposition that made sense for our operation.
The choice between Microsoft and Google may well have been closer if we didn't have such a reliance of MacOS. Apple still have market dominance in the creative industries, and Microsoft still tends to develop first for Windows, and then second for other platforms. It will be interesting to see if Steve Ballmer's recent commitments to the Cloud will see Microsoft starting to develop more even-handedly for multiple platforms.
However, the choice made to move to Google wasn't one made by default. It was the unanimous verdict of the project team that Google offered the best platform for our business. It is clear that the product set was developed with the Internet at the core, and felt to be the only product that really exploited the fact that it was delivered in a multi-tenanted environment. The pricing, whilst extremely attractive to the Group FD, was not a major influence in the decision making.
Once the decision was made, planning could begin. Unlike most of the projects that I have worked on in the past, the technology element of this was relatively light. No servers to build, no software to install, no integration of any great note. The main concerns were about migration of data into the new platform, and with IMAP and iCal standard to cover most of that, a relatively straightforward planning phase was completed.
Without fewer technology elements to worry about, the project has been able to focus on business change. Quite a lot of that business change, it has to be said, has been to help people come to terms with two features of Google Mail: conversation threading and message labelling. Both of these features are very different to what people have been used to in Thunderbird (or Outlook-like products). Both of these features also challenge people who spend hours each day fastidiously filing email into confronting a possible reality – that they are wasting their time. With extensive and fast search functionality, and reliable automatic labelling based on rules, the days of filing email may be numbered.
However, that last paragraph is from somebody who has never really seen the point of filing email, and I know that for the filers in our organisation, the labelling in Google is impacting quite fundamentally on their day-to-day working habits.
In planning for migration, a few assumptions were made early on. First of all, that everyone would need to migrate into the new diary system on the same day. Co-existence with Oracle Calendar wouldn't work, and one of the biggest bugbears of our former calendar product was that meeting invitations received from clients and suppliers using Outlook/Exchange or Notes/Domino sat stupidly in the Thunderbird inbox, whilst Oracle Calendar remained blind to them. The second assumption was that everyone's entire email history would need to be transferred into the new environment. That amounted to around 1TByte of data as a result of the previous platform having no individual user space quotas in a high-file-size industry. Finally, we decided to limit what was released to users from day one to email, calendar, chat and contacts management, leaving Google Docs and Google Sites to a second phase.
We adopted a phased pilot approach to deployment. The first group of users (the project team plus members of the Imagination IT team) migrated over to Google for everything bar calendar in December. They, intentionally, were given no training (although most had been exposed to the Google platform in one way or another earlier in the project). The results confirmed that we needed to think long and hard about the way in which we trained people.
Phase two of the pilot hit in January. This time with support and training, we brought another 50 people onto the product for email; between then and now, we also brought over a number of people who had extremely large mailboxes. The other significant group of users in the second pilot was those who have become “Google Guides” – local points of contact for departments, and trained up not only in the tools, but also in some techniques for how to coach and help others.
By the end of last week, there were over 100 people across the business using Google for email and contacts management. As of this morning, the figure is closer to 150, and we have just over two weeks of bringing in 20-30 people each day to complete the migration. That's hopefully enough to keep the overall disruption to the business to a minimum, but long enough that our support network doesn't get completely overwhelmed.
It will take some months for the new services to bed down. At that point, we'll start to roll out Google Docs and Sites, although at the moment the intention is that those are deployed to help with specific applications, rather than just turning them on for everyone. I've seen too many examples where powerful content management tools like those are deployed without help to structure how they are used, and mis-managed chaos being the net result.
The experience this far has been largely positive. I'm sure that in the coming 6-8 weeks we will see a big increase in support load, tears, tantrums and the odd word of thanks. Being able to focus on implementing the change, rather than implementing the technology however, has been an extremely liberating experience. Having the Google Guides located in and around the business has been remarkable in its effectiveness thus far.
After a tour around the building first thing this morning to see how people were getting on, I stopped off in the restaurant. I bumped into Kevin, a colleague from the fourth floor. “It's remarkable” he commented “People actually seem to be really excited about this Google stuff”…