7 Tips CIOs Must Consider When Moving To Google Apps

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Gartner recently touted Google’s role in the enterprise and “cloud” forecasting that "cloud email" would represent 55% of the enterprise email market by 2020.

Maven Wave became a Google Apps Partner in 2010 and focuses on helping the enterprise understand and achieve the benefits of adopting the Google platform.

Last week, TechTarget covered Google Apps and profiled Maven Wave partner Jason Lee in, “Going Google? Follow these steps, CIOs, and ante up, consultant says.”

To supplement, here are the 7 Tips CIOs Must Consider When Moving To Google Apps that Tech Target didn’t have the space to cover:

1. Web Brower Readiness - Are your people and systems ready with your current browser?  The poorer performance of older browsers will hinder adoption.

2. Involved in the Business - Pilots of web-based solutions are often too focused on evaluation from an IT perspective.  There needs to be buy-in from the business side not just IT.  Business users may reject the technology if they feel it’s being jammed down their throat.

3. Evaluate Network Readiness - Although it wouldn’t seem like a leading factor, adopting SaaS-based technology requires sufficient access to the Internet to reach the application.  If networks have insufficient bandwidth, or proxy servers do not have adequate performance, the user experience for SaaS applications can be affected, while having nothing to do with the solution itself.

4. Determine User Readiness - Similar to network readiness, you have to ensure that your workforce is ready to take on the challenge of moving to a cloud solution in place of a traditional client-server application.  User adoption of a technology is affected by a myriad of factors, but if users feel prepared, and that others around them can help them prepare, then it’s a big leg-up on the implementation.

5. Confirm Cost Effectiveness - In the end, the implementation of a cloud or SaaS-based technology has to make sense from a cost perspective.  License costs alone do not capture the cost of supporting an application in-house.  Server space, IT personnel, data center usage, rollout-costs all have to be factored into the equation.

6. Research Data Readiness - The best CRM tool (on-premise, or SaaS) can fail immediately if the data required to seed the system is not available.  When evaluating organizational readiness, ensure that the data needed to make the system effective on day 1 is available.  If it’s a messaging platform then Mail, Contacts and Calendar data must be immediately available for the migration.  If it’s a collaborative content management system, then the documents needed to seed the system must be organized, and clearly identified.

7. Evaluate Legacy Integrations - If the implementation of a cloud solution is aimed at replacing a current system, you need to carefully evaluate whether there are integration points exist with other on-premise solutions, and whether you have the resources, knowledge and tools to be able to re-establish that integration with the new cloud-based technology system.

We’d value your input on this subject - are you considering Google Apps? Why? Why not? Thanks in advance!