Email migration for 325 users across 89 locations in less than one hour.

2^nd Wind Exercise is a specialty exercise equipment retailer with 89 locations and 325 employees.  Their Exchange 2003 infrastructure was 4.5 yrs old and at the end-of-life.  Agosto was brought in to assess the environment, email usage and collaboration workflow and make a recommendation on whether to upgrade Exchange or find another solution.  After a detailed analysis we determined that Google Apps was the best fit for 2^nd Wind to replace their Exchange infrastructure.  You can find detailed reasons in the 2^nd Wind Google Apps Business Case.2ndWind Google Apps Business Case

The plan was to migrate users in a phased approach over a few months allowing for user training and a staged data migration.  However, 2^nd Wind’s Exchange servers had other plans.  After the third Exchange server crash in two weeks, we decided to cut everyone over to Google Apps as fast as possible.  At 4pm on Valentine’s Day we started the migration.   By 5pm we had all users provisioned and email functionality restored for all 325 users.  We then began the daunting task of migrating 75GB of Exchange data.  Due to bandwidth limitations the full migration from Exchange to Google Apps for 325 employees (and 75GB of their data) took 10 days.

Our post-migration survey showed that users loved the speed, ease of access and features of Google Apps over Outlook/Exchange.  According to user feedback, the top five Google Apps features are:

1. Google Sites

2. Google Docs and Spreadsheets

3. Ease of access

4. Virtually limitless storage

5. Google Calendar

Prior to Google Apps the Exchange server had crashed 3 times in 2 weeks resulting in days of downtime.  Following the Google Apps deployment, email hasn’t been down in 10 months.  More importantly, by converting to Google Apps we saved 2^nd Wind $146,947 doesn’t even include the cost avoidance of using Google Docs and Spreadsheets instead of Microsoft Office.

Google apps was a big win at 2nd Wind.  My team at Agosto managed all aspects of the migration to Google Apps, from TCO analysis all the way through implementation.

- Aric Bandy

“Taking it to the Cloud” Tom Kelly responds in CFO Magazine

Taking It to the Cloud
I found your article “A Place in the Cloud” (InTech, September) interesting, yet in some ways it smacked of fear marketing. Slowly taking low-priority business tasks to the cloud is similar to each and every new business idea — start with a pilot and expand slowly. In the case of SaaS (software as a service), however, after it is determined that requirements can be met and scalability is not an issue, what is the difference between going with SaaS versus on-premise?

We’re a $100 million retailer with more than 300 employees and over 100 locations. Once we answered the requirements and scalability questions, we made the switch from Microsoft Exchange to Google Apps, saving more than $225,000; we implemented NetSuite for our ERP needs; and we moved from an on-premise payroll/HRIS system to ADP’s on-demand offerings. Other SaaS applications we adopted include WorkOasis, Adaptive Planning, DocuSign, Concur, eFax, Halogen, Monster, WebEx, and Zoomerang. Have there been comments from the employees? You bet: “Why didn’t we make these moves sooner!”

For most of these SaaS applications there is no need to integrate the data; the efficient and cost-effective niche that each provides is enough. Where integration is necessary, a simple interface is provided by each vendor that allows a nontechnical person — dare I say even a financial person — to do the integration.

A colleague of mine once commented to me, “The solution makes too much sense, so we won’t do it!” It seems that this observation is spot-on concerning the market perception of moving away from the on-premise world to SaaS.
Thomas E. Kelly
CFO/CIO
2nd Wind Exercise Equipment
<a href=’http://enlightenedit.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/election-results-cfo.pdf’>election-results-cfo</a>

Google Video – Enterprise Video Sharing

Now that Google has launched Google Video, an enterprise youtube, as part of Google Apps, I can talk about the pilot that we’ve been running at 2nd Wind Exercise.  2nd Wind has 325 employees and over 100 locations across 9 states.  As one might imagine, training can be very difficult and expensive.  We participated in a pilot with Google Video to leverage a youtube-like private video sharing platform for sharing videos across the enterprise.  We’re publishing training videos, important corporate announcements, newly placed TV commercials and even some humorous content.  Since the interface is built off youtube.com, most users already know how to use the tool.  Here’s the video we shot for Google:

Online network share (file storage) – Getdropbox.com

Is a server-less IT strategy possible in the mid-market / enterprise space?  Can an organization leverage SaaS and outsourced partners to effectively remove all premise-based IT?  No one doubts the success of SaaS / ondemand applications for specific functions like CRM (Salesforce.com, Rightnow.com), Financial Modeling (Adaptive Planning), ERP (NetSuite, Plex), etc.  But few mid-market and enterprise companies are attempting an entirely SaaS / ondemand strategy.

One of obsticals is file storage and management.  As an IT Director, file storage and management is a crucial part of a healthy backup, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity plan (BCP).  Untill recently, I have not found a decent SaaS storage solution that could replace the local server or storage appliance.  The ideal would be a solution similar to offline files and folders, the ability to sync local files and folders with a server or storage appliance.  Getdropbox is one such solution that could replace the local server for file storage and sharing.  I’m beta-testing www.getdropbox.com and it functions almost identically to offline files and folders.  I drop files into a local directory and they are sync’d almost immediately.  I loose my Internet connection or I’m on an airplane and I can access all my local files.  When I come back online, the directories sync.  Additionally, all my files are backed up in case my laptop fails or is stolen.   Best of all – no servers are required.  The solution is still in early stages of testing and presently you’re only allowed 2GB of storage but if this is any indication of what’s in our future we may one step closer to an entirely server-less IT solution.

Aric Bandy

Ubiquity: Rethinking the way we interact with information

Every once in a while a new technology comes along that changes the way we do things, think DVD, iPhone, VoIP, etc.  Ubiquity, a Firefox add-on in beta, is one of the coolest new tools I’ve seen on the market.  It’s a mashup tool for those of us who are not code monkeys.  You can use common language to execute complex functions.

Ubiquity’s goals are:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)

• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone (not just Web developers) to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)

• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.

• Extend the browser functionality easily.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Business Continuity / Resiliency – Katrina should teach execs the importance of risk avoidance

Executives, especially optimistic or visionary leaders, love to challenge the ‘REAL’ need of BCP.  They’re all too quick to point out that it’s not an investment but risk avoidance.  Everyone assumes that they’ll never need a business continuity plan until they do…

Lessons learned from Katrina:  http://computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9113880&intsrc=hm_ts_head

Loyola makes more preparations

Meanwhile, at Loyola University’s New Orleans campus, a key new IT disaster recovery component has been added since the 2005 hurricanes. It is an intermediate site hosted at an out-of-state location set up to maintain communications and a simplified version of the school’s Web site that’s available with a simple DNS change.

“We had a very full-fledged disaster recovery plan prior to Katrina,” said Bret Jacobs, executive director of IT at the school. But even so, what Loyola learned from those earlier storms was that even more preparations were needed.

“Because of Katrina, we lost power in New Orleans for an extended period of time, and we realized that we wanted to keep that particular presence on the World Wide Web all the time,” Jacobs said. To do that, the school added the intermediate site for a third level of redundancy in an emergency.

That intermediate site complements on-site emergency generator power and air conditioning for the IT department, as well as complete off-site critical systems redundancy provided by disaster recovery vendor SunGard Availability Services, Jacobs said.

Since Katrina, the school has also moved its course management system online and has it hosted remotely so that students can continue their classes over the Internet in the event the campus is closed during an emergency. “What we’re trying to do is make sure the educational process is not interrupted,” he said. “We’re not a distance learning campus per se, but we’re using some of those technologies.” With the approach of Gustav, the university’s IT department and its disaster recovery vendor have been put on alert mode, Jacobs said. Full system backups are being performed daily and are being shipped off-site as part of a standard IT plan.

Software as a Service (SaaS) Employee Appraisal System

Implementing a SaaS based employee appraisal system will enable achieving your strategic goals and tactical objectives.

During the famous Apollo 13 space mission in 1970, the astronauts on board the ship and Mission Control personnel on the ground at NASA were faced with one of their worst nightmares.  An explosion had left the crew with a dwindling oxygen supply and failing power, making it not only impossible for the crew to complete their mission to walk on the moon, but also very unlikely they would survive the trip back home on their crippled spacecraft.

When astronaut Jim Lovell spoke the famous words, “Houston, we have a problem,” the scientists and engineers at Mission Control did not form committees, hire outside consultants or schedule off-site meetings to discuss the situation. The team knew that it had one goal – bring back the astronauts alive. This goal guided every action the Mission Control team took, and ultimately they were successful (even if the space craft was a little worse for wear).

While today’s business environment is usually not as dramatic as this, many organizations struggle to practically align their strategic objectives with tactical elements to meet their overarching mission. They may have several distinct and unrelated goals that create organizational confusion, or they may have one goal but no clear idea of the types of initiatives and projects they need to get them to their destination. One way that some organizations are resolving challenges such as these is through the implementation of a Business Alignment Model (BAM) combined with a tool to provided each and every employee with feedback on how the activities they perform aid in the overall goal or mission of the company.

Business Alignment Model
A BAM is a performance measurement system that provides a pragmatic and actionable way to translate an organization’s strategy into operational terms, improving upon some of the basic concepts of a balanced scorecard model.

A BAM serves as a tool to convert the strategy of the organization into a form that everyone understands. It provides a method of setting goals and measuring and tracking performance, as well as a report card for the organization. A BAM is a flexible tool designed for adjustment and growth as organizational learning, strategic feedback, and communication improves.

Similar to a balanced scorecard model, a BAM tracks financial metrics as well as the intangible factors that create value within an organization. Where the two models differ is in how the components work together. A BAM is not predicated entirely on several components that may have their own distinct goals, objectives and measurements. Rather, a BAM is built upon a single, financial goal that each component in the system feeds up to.

A BAM does not place equal emphasis on measurement of intangible elements of a business and financial objectives. Rather, intangible measures are implicitly reflected through the success in meeting the overall goal of the organization.

The relationships between a company’s core mission/vision and other components of the model are shown in the attached BAM PDF.

BAM Process
A BAM process begins with executive management taking the steps to set the organization’s agenda. From a broad sense, those steps include:

- Engaging leadership to describe the high-level business strategy for each of their areas.
- Identifying the financial gap between the organization’s current position and targeted goal.
- Setting the target for what is possible.
- Identifying initiatives that can be launched today to improve operations.
- Understanding and synchronizing interrelationships between initiatives.
- Prioritizing initiatives and pulling the trigger when appropriate.

As shown in the attachment, the plan developed from these steps is structured in a rough pyramid format, creating a top-down, linear relationship between the overall vision of the organization and tactical projects. Every action within the organization is designed to play a part in achieving the mission of the company – from the high-level strategic objectives down to each employee’s annual performance goals.

The goals are reviewed from the strategic items to the tactical projects quarterly.  This is where Halogen is a perfect fit for enabling strategic and tactical success.  It will allows a company to quickly provide feedback down to the individual level, determine if goals and objectives are attained, or if continued focus is necessary or in the case where additional objectives need to be added it can be done in a very structured, concise and efficient manner.  So “Everyone” in the organization knows how they are doing on an individual basis as well as how their actions are helping or in some cases hindering the Company’s ability to achieve its mission.

Each component in a BAM includes a qualitative definition, such as “Our mission is to be the industry leader in widgets,” combined with a quantitative metric, such as “Improve operating profit 8% by end of fiscal year,” that will help leadership understand if the goal has been achieved or not.

Structurally, the model consists of four basic layers — the organization’s vision, strategic objectives, broad initiatives and projects – enabling a management team to view their organization’s performance in a holistic way.

Vision
Like the Apollo 13 example, every company must have a vision or overarching goal that guides their actions. Without a vision, a company is wandering aimlessly through the marketplace, waiting for something to happen to it instead of taking a proactive stance to create its own path. Again, vision drives all of the metrics in a BAM system.

Strategic Objectives
Strategic objectives set by the management team center around three core business areas: business processes (such as financial operations), learning and growth (focusing on employees), and customer experience. Each of these core areas help executives prioritize what key issues need to be addressed to achieve the organization’s primary goal.

Strategic objectives in a BAM should be set based on a long-term timeframe, such as three to five years. Doing so helps the organization approach a BAM initiative as a process, not a quick fix to larger business issues.

Broad Initiatives
Broad initiatives serve as the framework for tactical elements, that as a whole, help to meet the goal of each strategic objective. The measurements of success for these components are generally set on a shorter timeframe, such as one year.

Projects
Projects are the base components within a BAM that feed into the broad initiative level of the hierarchy. For any particular broad initiative, there may be one major project designed to achieve the goal set forth in the broad initiative, or several depending on the complexity of the goal.

Development Feedback
As part of a BAM process, employees visit with their managers each quarter and review goals set at an individual level. These individual goals, the most basic building blocks in the BAM hierarchy, are designed to collectively strengthen the organization’s efforts in achieving its mission. Whether it is a janitor’s goal to decrease the cost of cleaning supplies used in the facility, or a marketing manager’s goal to consolidate its outside advertising and public relations agency relationships, the objectives set at the individual level allow the employees to understand how they fit into the larger BAM picture.

BAM Benefits
To be clear, there is no such thing as a perfect BAM. Business conditions change, and businesses must change with them to survive. But a well-executed BAM will help a company realize several benefits.

Clarifies a company’s vision and ensures strategies are aligned with one another. A BAM allows an organization to understand what it is trying to achieve, how and when it will do it, and how it will measure success. A BAM maintains an end-to-end holistic business view that will synchronize projects and initiatives with business strategy.

Ensures critical business goals are clear. A BAM provides explicit “key operating criteria” to the organization, giving context to project prioritization.

Establishes a broad framework for performance improvement. With the guidance of leadership’s strategic directions for the business, a BAM helps define a vision for “how we will operate in the future.”

Combines long-term, strategic objectives with short-term improvement projects. Projects can address their specific issues as well as create new opportunity and enhance the overall infrastructure.

Conclusion
Without an actionable, strategic plan with a single goal, the Mission Control team at NASA would not have been successful in their objective to safely bring the Apollo 13 crew home. The same general principle applies to any company wrestling with issues such as addressing internal inefficiencies, enhancing the organization’s employee development process, or winning market share.

A BAM is a powerful tool that translates the strategy of the organization into a form that everyone understands. A BAM is a report card for the company, giving management a flexible tool to set goals and measure and track performance at every level of the organization. While similar concepts exist between a BAM and balanced scorecard model, the main difference lies in a BAM’s focus on a single, overarching goal that each component in the system feeds up to.

By Tom Kelly, CFO/CIO of 2nd Wind Exercise

Google Apps – Has email become a commodity?

Has email become a commodity?   It depends who you ask.  For years Microsoft has had the market (62% of commercial email according to a recent Radicati Group analysis) believing that premise-based collaboration with all the bells and whistles was a requirement of a savvy business.  In fact, Microsoft would lead you to believe that email and collaboration is unique to each commercial entity when in fact almost every Exchange Server I’ve deployed has been homogeneous.

We all have the same basic email and collaboration needs.  We need it to be available anywhere, it has to have ample storage, and we need to easily create and share content (docs, spreadsheets, etc.).  Google Apps provides these core features without all the fuss of more servers, software and licensing, and ongoing IT support.  Google Apps Premier includes Google Sites, Docs, Spreadsheets, Presentation, Postini SPAM filtering and security policies, GMail and Google Talk with 25Gb per user for $50 / user / year.  This approach to email and collaboration is gaining significant market share, even Microsoft has retooled their approach by launching Microsoft Live, a Google Apps approach to email and collaboration.   In the end, the commoditization of email helps us all – we get more features, better access and scalability and all for less money!

Aric Bandy