First Chuch of Christ, Scientist, Shares the News with Google Apps

Company Background

Founded in 1879, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, encompasses both a centralized church and international news organization, The Christian Science Monitor. A truly global institution, the church has more than 1,200 branch churches and societies in 80 countries around the world. The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Christian Science Monitor is published both online and in print and employs staff worldwide.

Business Challenges

Microsoft Exchange was a long-standing part of the daily routine of many employees. However, the email client was starting to cause a strain on the IT team, the organization and the end-users. CIO Curt Edge said that the IT team “felt that constantly patching and updating email servers detracted from their available time to support the core missions of the organization.”

Employees reported spending significant amounts of time managing their email inboxes instead of sending emails, as they worked to keep cascading layers of folders under control. Considering the mounting costs of Microsoft Licensing, the team at The First Church of Christ, Scientist, began looking for alternatives that would enable their globally-distributed team to be able to work more efficiently.

One major concern when looking at options was change management. Since the staff had long average tenures, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, wanted to ensure that the process of overcoming entrenched habits and becoming accustomed to a new system would not be too painful for end-users. In the past, enterprise systems had been rolled out all at once without prior notification to end- users, which caused rough transitions.

The First Church of Christ, Scientist, had originally planned to do the entire migration themselves. However, IT Manager Matt DeJohn knew that the IT team’s core competency was helping other departments, and not migrating email; so, he said, “We hired the pros.”

Solution

Cloud Sherpas helped The First Church of Christ, Scientist, develop a road-map for how to handle the change, and success depended on involving the entire organization from the beginning of the project. As an experienced Google partner in similar migrations, Cloud Sherpas worked with The First Church team to put the Google Guides program in action to ease transition hiccups both for end-users and for the IT support department. The Google Guides program is a peer-to-peer methodology through which a trained pilot group of employees supports their colleagues in learning to adapt to Google technology and to take advantage of more advanced features for their particular roles.

Many reporters and editors for The Christian Science Monitor were already using their personal accounts to take advantage of Google’s free collaboration features and large mailboxes. Other employees were either Google fans or eager to become early adopters of the new technology. A company-wide bulletin was sent out to ask people to become Google Guides. Over 50 employees across departments jumped at the chance, as people expressed their enthusiasm to help their departments run more efficiently. In fact, so many people volunteered that some had to be turned away.

Some departments were more attached to Outlook than others and consequently required more hand-holding during the switch. The Google Guides proved instrumental in both inspiring buy-in and in providing individualized attention to peer users.

Google Guides also maintained a shared Google doc to log all of the issues that arose. A week before Google Apps went live, a Cloud Sherpas trainer spent time on-site to answer questions and provide training on Gmail and Calendar basics, as well as specialized training for executive assistants.

Results

The positive financial impact from the change was immediately apparent, as the The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was able to retire nine Microsoft Exchange servers. The ongoing cost savings will continue to rise because they have not renewed their Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.

In addition to the reduced cost of total ownership (TCO), the organization is reaping the benefits of the new collaboration capabilities, as users quickly noticed that Google Apps for Business offers a new suite of tools and accessibility.
For example, when offices in Boston were hit with snowstorms, employees could not get to work. The benefits of Google Apps became clear when people could easily log in from home, and the organization was able to stay productive during the snow days.

The snowed-in Bostonians were not the only ones to acknowledge the benefits of full, rich access from any browser with an internet connection. Staff looked back on their previous email client and were amazed that they used to spend up to two hours some days just managing emails.

The migration initiative was originally focused on Gmail/Calendar/Contacts with the intention of letting employees organically discover the benefits of the rest of the Google suite, such as Google Sites and Apps.

The adoption curve has followed according to plan; more than 8,000 Google Docs have been created and that number is growing daily. Users are taking advantage of the collaboration benefits as well; on average, 6.5 users are shared per document. Training sites and eLearning tools provided by Cloud Sherpas helped employees to be proactive and learn how to use features like Google Sites on Google Apps Premier. Even those who resisted the change now love using Google with its “anywhere access.” Furthermore, editors and reporters are now building their own project sites with Google Apps.

In a testimony to their successful roll-out and end-user product enthusiasm, DeJohn reported, “If we can do it, anybody can do it.” Staff have become self-supporting, finding that they can go out and instantly find the information they need on their own. Help desk teams are happy that employees commonly answer their own usage inquiries with the simple catchphrase, “Just Google it!”

Read more about how Cloud Sherpas can help your company through a seamless Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps migration.