Colloboration in the Public Sector, Local/State Government - and introduction

[Adam Levithan]

Hi All. My name is Adam Levithan. I'm a recent MVP in Office Services and Servers and I've been working with Public Sector, Local/State Government customers for over 10 years. I'm located in the center of the public sector, Washington DC and hear a lot of the opportunities with transitioning between versions of products, and certainly to the cloud.

What are some key questions you have?

[#2]

Hi Adam,

I work for a large government agency which is in the midst of digital disruption and looking towards a cloud future.

In your opinion what does moving from on-premise to cloud typically mean for employees?

Thanks, Brett

[#3]

We are a small Government agency (~100) and the biggest plus that we've seen so far with users has been them being able to access email with multiple devices from outside our building.

The rest of the features (SharePoint, Groups, OneDrive) have not been embraced. I think they find that the options are too confusing and it is just easier for them to use e-mail and network shares. They now have access, via Terminal Services, to virtual desktops from outside our building and that they've embraced.

Granted, my users are typically non-technical and older, so that may be why they don't embrace it. I have a couple users who have, but they and I can't seem to break through to the others.

If we ever get Planner, Sway, or Teams, one of those might be the break through.

[#4]

Our large agency is 18,000 strong.

As you would expect we face most of the same reasons for resistance to new tools.

If widespread comms can articulate the value proposition for users we can build from that.

Our next opportunity to do that is with the launch of Enterprise Yammer.

On a personal level, I am looking to imbed WOL practices in my everyday and from that connect with others doing the same and continue to spread the word and benefits to others.

Patience is most certainly a virtue.

[#5]

Hi Brett,
At worst moving the cloud should be no different than staying exactly where you are (yes I said at worst). At best, the potential is huge for all of the innovation and capabilities that the cloud provides. Whether you're talking about the benefits to the CIO organization - and being able to quickly adapt server resources to changing needs instead of having to go through long change management processes and buying hardware, or talking purely about end-user tools that are being designed and updated for ease-of-use.
Let's just take exchange for an example. What once was a 250 mb mailbox limit, that then sprawled into PSTs galore is now 50 GB in Office 365. Now there might be governance that still says employees need to keep their e-mail smaller than that (it is HUGE) but entirely new decisions can be made, and burdens are relieved off the IT organization allowing them to focus on more service activities.
Is there a specific concern you have?

[#6]

Hi Cary,
You're in the majority. There's a spectrum of collaboration tool(SharePoint, Groups, etc) usage, and there must be an initial value to convince users to make the effort to change how they're working. If you'd like to increase adoption, I would follow your first benefit - access to e-mail anywhere - with OneDrive usage. I've seen a lot of great adoption when people see that their documents are both on their desktop and on any of their other devices. And that they can also share links with specific people to do drafting.
I remember the days of DOCUMENTNAME-REVISIONDATE-INITIALS as a document name, and if you're in the same boat, maybe you can start showing how SharePoint alleviates some of that repetitiveness ... but I've seen the must success when you start small with a focused group who can then tell other employees what they've been working on and the benefit.

Good luck and let me know how I can help