Change Management

We often will have discussions with customers around change management. Generally, companies that are looking to move to Google Workspace (formerly G Suite), there’s often some other large transformational change that’s happening within the organisation because it is a big change to move to Google Workspace. Often if you’re coming from an Outlook, Excel, Word, Microsoft background or more traditional software, it is going to be a change for your users. So there is going to need to be that leadership within the organisation that will sponsor the project and drive the change. Again, that leads back to the familiarity. You can move to the cloud from Exchange Office 365 and not require that kind of change. Now as a consequence, that means that the benefits that companies may leverage from Office 365 may not be as large.

It’s not to say that you can’t leverage transformational change from Office 365, but it is more difficult because of that ease of use piece that we were talking about. Actually, because of the familiarity, because people are just familiar with it. It will take a lot to change people’s habits and processes and workflows. So if people are given something that’s kind of similar to what they had before, they’re much more likely to just stick to that same pattern.

Google Workspace Enables Transformational Change

Whereas if you’re bringing in Google Workspace, the whole marketing message internally is this is a transformational change. There’s going to be much more effort put into changing the workflows. We do things like business transformation labs, which any of you watching our channel, will I talked about it before and I’ll link to that. So we would run those as part of a deployment or a migration to make sure that people are looking at these outdated processes and changing them or mapping them over to Google and really just getting the benefit of this cloud-based transformational product that they’re bringing into their business.

What types of companies choose Google Workspace?

So I think with the Microsoft world where we sort of see companies not moving to G-Suite or choosing Outlook it is very often where you have a situation that there’s a very embedded process maybe around Outlook or some other Microsoft product. If I was to look at the types of companies as well. Again, you hear this sort of myth within the ecosystem that a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is for smaller businesses and Microsoft or Office 365 is for larger companies. I don’t believe that that’s true at all. We have customers with thousands and thousands of employees that use Google. Google has its own examples of massive organisations. But I think there is definitely a profile of an organisation and we would try to profile a company. So if you were talking to, the obvious example would be a tech business, they’re more than likely going to be using Google Workspace.

But if you take it outside of that, you’ve got companies that are fast-paced that have a lot of young staff. There’s a huge amount of traction Google have gotten within the education space. So you’ve got people coming from colleges who’ve been using Google Workspace for education for a huge amount of their education career. So they are familiar with that and that’s what they’re looking for when they move into a business as well.

Also, you’ve got companies who are looking to be more collaborative, open to innovation and, as I said, are looking for that transformational change. And when we find those types of organisations and they can be in any industry. I mentioned the tech industry, but Google is successful in manufacturing, retail, a huge amount of industries. We got a lot of creative companies, anyone in the digital space and news and media. Again, big success areas.

The Catalyst for Change

That said you can also get very traditional businesses that are looking for that transformational change. They’re looking for a rapid, innovative, collaborative product that they can deploy quickly on maybe for a particular project that they want to increase that innovation within the organisation. Those types of companies, those profile of companies tend to be leaning towards Google, in our experience. This is not to say for the Office 365 fans out there that it’s not possible to do that with Microsoft. I think that it is, but I believe that the push for change needs to be bigger because there isn’t the catalyst of the Google Workspace tool there to force the change. People are being forced to make this change, so you’ve got to put in the training and the change management. I think there’s a tendency maybe within Office 365 deployments, from what I’ve seen, to lean back on the familiarity that like, “Oh, we know this product. We don’t need to try and people. We don’t need to look at the processes.”

And I’ve seen some really good Office 365 partners who will make sure that their companies do that change management and successfully bring about that transformation change. It’s great when you see that but very often, you’ll see the opposite where it’s just a, “We’re just going to swap it out, one for the other.” In those scenarios, people don’t end up leveraging the solution and getting the full benefit of transformation change.

It’s not all about the technology

The main thing to remember in any Digital Transformation project is that it’s not all about the tech.  Organisations that understand this will also have a large focus on the people and processes.  When you take all of these areas together you can bring about successful and long-lasting Digital Transformation.  Whatever solution you choose for your business make sure you bring along your people on the journey and break apart those old outdated processes.