As a provider of Enterprise Software running on customers data centers, it was hard to deliver a uniform high outcome to all customers, because of the huge variations in equipment, capacities, capabilities and processes of the different IT environments. Customers that were better resourced by way of equipment's and teams experienced better outcomes.
About a year and a half ago, we chose to move to the cloud as the default platform for our Enterprise Collaboration Software offerings both to offer uniform reliability and performance across customers of all sizes and to lessen our maintenance load, to free us for faster value creation for our customers.
Deciding to move to the cloud was the easy part. The decision brought in many challenges and opportunities that needed to be managed. Building out the cloud infrastructure, moving workloads to the cloud, convincing customers to move to the cloud, managing transition costs, responding to new opportunities and possibilities on the cloud platform, retraining our team, redefining and re-positioning our offering and so on. It was a wholesale transformation touching every aspect of our business, without the luxury of stopping what we were already busy doing.
We had to experiment with several approaches to make this transition - Design Thinking, DevOps, Agile, Automation and anything else we could find that could cut the work down or give us greater control amidst all the chaos that got kicked up.
One thing that brought it all together for us was our new collaboration platform - Ideolve.
As ideas and challenges poured in, we used Ideolve to record, share and collaborate on them. Enabling us to use the collective intelligence of the team for better solutions. Without drowning ourselves in endless meetings, email exchanges and arguments.
The benefits were not just in terms of easily sharing and locating information and lesser meetings. The ability to work on an idea over long periods of time, organize initiatives and develop a deeper common understanding of the opportunities and challenges and how to approach them, made for much greater team effectiveness and efficiency.
It’s hard to imagine how we could have done all this over email or chat.
An added benefit was the 80%+ reduction of our internal mail traffic, leading to savings of many productive hours at work.