CASE STUDY

COMPANY BACKGROUNDFounded in 1853, Veolia provides a range of water, waste management and energy services. The organization serves more than 40 countries worldwide and is the only environmental solutions organization with specific capabilities around water and wastewater treatment, energy management, waste resource and recovery services and industrial cleaning and facilities maintenance services in Australia and New Zealand.

CHALLENGESAfter undergoing a global restructuring in 2011, Veolia identified the need for a more modern, common messaging and collaboration solution to connect employees across the globe. The Australia and New Zealand team was excited to apply this global directive on the local level.

According to Brett Stapleton, CIO of Veolia ANZ, different teams were using different messaging and collaboration platforms, each of which had different capabilities and design. While most mail platforms were Microsoft Exchange, the versions varied and Stapleton reveals that at one point in time there were 300 of them, with no common address list.

HEADQUARTERS Sydney, Australia

INDUSTRY Environmental Solutions

COMPANY SIZE 4,000+

SERVICES RENDERED Google Apps Implementation

Veolia

with Google AppsMigration

powers global change

CASE STUDY

3525 Piedmont RoadBuilding 8, Suite 710Atlanta, GA 30305

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2011-2014 Google for WorkGlobal Partner of the Year

Aiming to better connect its employees and encourage closer collaboration, Veolia decided to converge its 300+ messaging systems worldwide into a single solution.

SOLUTIONAs Stapleton shares, Veolia ANZ recognized it would be a lot more than just implementing a new technology and migrating data.

“To converge requires a change in behavior: not just a change in the work that is done, but a change in the way it is done. This transition was going to be as much about introducing a single collaboration platform to our global user base as it was a test of our ability as a company to change the way we work,” he says.

After evaluating a number of solutions, Veolia decided that Google Apps for Work was the right fit based on its extensive collaboration capabilities. Veolia also felt Google Apps would benefit local teams like that in ANZ. From the start, Veolia’s plan was to adopt the full collaboration suite and embrace the complete Google experience, not just mail and calendar.

After watching its counterparts across the globe roll out this major change, Veolia ANZ felt that it would need support to properly manage the move to Google Apps. This led the team to Cloud Sherpas.

“We decided early on that we wanted our team to have a positive experience and understand the benefits Google can bring to them personally and to the company, both at the zone level and the global level,” Stapleton shares. “We needed to build that excitement to win the hearts and minds of our users, and we couldn’t do that alone so we engaged Cloud Sherpas as a partner to guide us on the journey and help us realize our vision.”

Partnering with Cloud Sherpas, Veolia began working on the migration from both a technology and a change

management standpoint. According to Stapleton, his team was most impressed with the Sherpa team’s well-coordinated approach to change management, communications and training. This approach included structured communications introducing the Google journey with carefully constructed messaging shared on the company intranet, in presentations, in each office’s tea room and via email. The messages focused on the benefits of going Google and asked users how they felt about the change in order to measure sentiment.

Cloud Sherpas also worked with Veolia to build a network of 180 “Google Geeks,” a group of early adopters who volunteered to provide site-based support to team members during go-live. Additional efforts leading up to the go-live included white glove training for executives and their assistants and multiple online training sessions for all staff.

RESULTSWhen all was said and done, Veolia not only had a successful go-live, but Stapleton reports that his team has continued to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback from management and team members.

“The user sentiment is high and everyone has really great things to say about our change management approach. In fact, we’ve seen a desire to adopt that same approach to other systems implementations,” he says.

As a result of this initial success, Veolia has already made plans to expand its use of Google for Work solutions. Specifically, the organization plans to substantially increase its use of Hangouts by the end of 2014, introduce centers of excellence to provide an open forum for communication and collaboration, encourage use of Google+ to better connect its workforce of over 2,700 users in ANZ and roll out Chromebooks and Chromeboxes.