Has your organization “Gone Google” or looking to adopt G Suite in the near future? If so, SADA’s G Suite Change Management and Adoption team applauds you…but have you had full adoption of G Suite by your users? Are you getting ROI?
My name is Nina, and I’m a Senior Consultant on SADA’s G Suite Change Management team. In our combined 6+ years of G Suite Adoption and Training, our team has helped hundreds of organizations transition and have a full adoption of G Suite while transforming their workspaces into more collaborative and productive, cloud-based environments. We strive to train and empower end users to take advantage of the entire G Suite so users feel more comfortable switching their workflows over to Google Docs for their word processing, Google Sheets for data crunching, and Google Slides for their presentations, plus other useful tools.
However, one thing we’ve noticed with many of our clients is that even after the transition to G Suite is said and done, full adoption of G Suite can struggle if the legacy system tools remain installed on employees’ machines. Oftentimes companies may find that their organization is at risk for inadvertently supporting twice the tooling necessary, which can lead to a number of issues.
Here are a few reasons why maintaining two types of productivity suite tooling is less than ideal:
1. Maintaining Redundant Legacy Software is costing you a lot of money
Here’s one way you could calculate the amount of money you will overspend, assuming you continue to maintain a dual environment of G Suite and legacy tools:
- Find the annual support cost for legacy productivity software
- Calculate the number of legacy licences org-wide (usually there are multiple licenses per user)
- Divide Annual Support Cost / Number of licenses
Some Google customers such as media company PopSugar have been able to save upwards of $200 per user per year by scaling their legacy licensing back by 80%-95%, leading to savings around $110,000 per year. On a grander scale, SADA partner Hunterdon Healthcare was even able to shave millions off of their annual licensing budget by reducing their legacy licenses.
Aside from the cost of per-user licenses, you’ll also be saving your organization from paying unneeded upgrade costs, training costs, management costs, server costs and support costs.
2. Preserving your Legacy tooling gives change-averse users little incentive to do a full adoption of G Suite, which is also costing you money
Why should end-users have a full adoption of G Suite and its newer collaborative features if they have their old software as a crutch still available on their desktops? Although it might seem like an innocent and expected end-user behavior, lack of adoption of G Suite tooling can be a huge opportunity cost.
It turns out that G Suite’s competitive per-user licensing cost isn’t the only thing helping organizations save money. In a 2015 report, Forrester found that even after adjusting for the cost of their G Suite licenses, companies with full adoption of G Suite (formerly named Google Apps for Work) received surplus savings upwards of $1000 per user over a 3-year period due to Google’s unique collaborative features.
More specifically, Forrester was able to put an average value on the following benefits gained over a 3-year period:
- $600+ savings per user thanks to real-time collaboration between peers with Docs, Sheets, Slides, Sites and Drive
- $400+ savings per user due to improved mobility and reduced travel costs thanks to G Suite’s accessibility anywhere, from any device
- $200+ savings per user after users switched from their legacy telephony solution to Google Hangouts
With so much money at stake, turning a blind eye while users side-step change doesn’t seem like such a guilt-free activity after all.
3. The Risk of Shadow IT increases
Maintaining a split environment can also send mixed messages to end users, who may notice that departmental workflows differ drastically depending on the tooling used. As long as legacy licensing is still in your environment and accessible on your users’ machines, users will not feel as much pressure to use new G Suite tools over other, more familiar tooling. As a result, users start to feel like there is no true consensus as to how they are expected to work, and so “Shadow IT” can easily crop up.
In summary, reducing your legacy license count can help your organization in more ways than just reducing IT costs. It can also help guide your users to explore the new, collaborative behaviors brought on by G Suite – behaviors that have proven to be financially valuable in and of itself.
However, realizing the many benefits that full G Suite adoption can bring your organization is just half of the battle. Next, comes the actual removal strategy itself, which can cause panic among users if not handled correctly. To learn how we at SADA have helped guide removal strategies in the past, keep an eye out for our next post – How – and When – To Cut the Cord on Legacy Licensing!
Interested in learning more about handling change in this ever-changing digital age? Download our brief, “How to Manage Change When Adopting New Technology in Your Business,” today.
Nina Tompkin
Senior Google Trainer and Adoption Consultant | Enterprise Consulting