Change management case study: GSA

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>>Presenter: Thank you all for being here. Casey, we were talking earlier with folks
from Interior, folks from NOAA. We started off, and I want you to start off there too,
talking about "Why do this anyway?" Everyone talks about email to the cloud. Why? What's
the purpose of doing this?
>>Casey Coleman: Well, there's a great many reasons. Some of them we've figured out after
we made the move. But in GSA's case, we had a real burning platform internally because
our email system was aging. You said that we were one of the first to give everyone
email. I think we were still running those same servers [Presenter laughs] in 2009. The
infrastructure was aging. It would often go out. I would spend all weekend sending test
emails to myself to make sure it was still up and running. So we needed to do something.
We looked at architecting it internally for high availability versus going to the cloud,
and determined that for us, the cloud offered a mature business offering, and that we could
save money and improve our liability and improve a lot of other business operations at the
same time. For us, it was really an internal issue.
>>Presenter: You had a lot of top level push--
>>Coleman: Oh, absolutely.
>>Presenter: --for saying that this is going to go and this is going to go quickly.
>>Coleman: Right. Yeah, the Obama administration had announced cloud first, as a priority.
We were trying to follow that guidance. Our administrator and all the leadership team
were totally committed to making this move. That senior leadership executive sponsorship
commitment I think was one of our most significant success factors.
>>Presenter: We're going to talk about some of your lessons learned, because I know you
have a bunch of them. Peter, after you guys were awarded this contract, then you had to
actually roll it out. And guess what? If she's being told it's quick, then she's going to
you and saying, "We have to do this quickly."
>>Peter Gallagher: That's exactly right, Chris. Casey was a great boss to have. We really
started way before, of course, the contract awards. For the better part of a year, we
had been looking at and analyzing the Google technologies from the security perspective,
from IT integration, all the pieces that factor into implementing something that's so dramatically
different than on premise tool looks like. We had to become comfortable with that first
because GSA's a very important customer of ours. We couldn't propose something to them
that we weren't fully comfortable with.
>>Presenter: This was getting a lot of attention within Unisys, as well.
>>Gallagher: Yeah, I always joke that the CEO of Unisys came to six monthly meetings
with Casey and her administrator and the president of Federal. They all wanted weekly updates,
so I was about 6'4", and then I got down to about 6 foot by the time the [laughter] thing
got delivered. I had a lot of management attention, let's say, from all my superiors. It was a
no-fail. Just before I forget, I want to thank and recognize the other team members, because
we were the prime contractor. But Tempus Nova is here, DD and Company are out there. Hi
guys. And Acumen is here as well. All vital members of the team. It was just a great team
effort with Casey's group and all the people we assembled. Then that guy had something
to do with it too.
>>Presenter: Alex, director of Enterprise Operations, you not only look at government
customers, but customers overall. What do folks who do this and do it right, what do
they do that makes it easier?
>>Alex Diacre: That's a great question. I think there's three things that the implementations
of cloud technology that go well have in common. The first is diligent planning. A lot of effort
goes into planning the implementation, planning the timelines, planning the integration. The
second is giving it a personality. Making it a part of the organization, not just another
IT project. It's not just another roll out . You can actually give it a brand and build
some momentum behind it. Third is make sure you prepare the users, prepare the organization,
prepare management, prepare everybody for the implementation. I think that's something
that the GSA did really well. Some of the bigger commercial customers like Motorola
spent a lot of time on the planning efforts, almost as much as they did on the technical
project management pieces.
>>Presenter: Casey, talk about some of the roll out, lessons learned. One of them was,
I know, was, they say, "Communicate, communicate, communicate." You had a bunch of ways that
you did that.
>>Coleman: We did. We had a really comprehensive communications and change management strategy
that in hindsight served us well. We started off by really, as Alex said, giving it a brand.
We called this our Drive to the Cloud, and we adopted a race car theme. We had a group
of people who served as early adopters and champions, and we called them pacers, because
they were riding the pace car to set the pace for those who would come later. We created
a whole series of strategic videos for GSA senior leaders. Went in front of the camera
to talk about their commitment and why they thought this was important strategically and
for our mission. We had group forums where people could ask and answer questions. We
told people, "Your last ditch plea for help should be to call the help desk. You should
turn to your training buddy. You should commit to go to training with a colleague and help
one another. You should ask your colleagues in the user forum" and so forth. We created
a sense of community in the sense that this was to everyone's benefit and everyone's responsibility
to be part of it. As you say, it's not an IT project. This is not something IT was doing.
This is something the agency was doing. We were all going to be responsible for its success.
>>Presenter: I know you had some policy challenges as well--
>>Coleman: Right.
>>Presenter: --in there. Talk about those.
>>Coleman: We redid our email and records in e-discovery policies as a consequence of
making this move. Previously, we had had retention of about 60 days, that was all we could do
due to cost and the operational considerations for backing things up on tape and retrieving
them. We have a journaling system that's part of the solution that allows us to keep them
for six months now and make e-discovery searches much easier. But we also had to educate people
and work with legal and work with procurement and work with our records management staff
to make sure we were setting this up properly and in compliance with the existing federal
guidelines.
>>Presenter: Peter, lessons learned from the contractor's side?
>>Gallagher: I would just add to what Casey said in terms of communication. We knew the
technology worked, as hundreds of millions of users-- We knew that, but then the real
risk was that adoption wouldn't take place. Our measurement-- GSA did a great contract
where they had an open-ended strategy. Their strategy wasn't just about changing email.
It was really about how to create an agency of the future, how to work towards a collaborative
environment, how to work from any device anywhere anytime. It was a big initiative that their
whole senior management team got behind and pushed. The tactical side of it was also important.
400,000 individual emails went out. A series of emails go out to the 17,000 people getting
them already for Blackberry, all the different issues. Focusing them on the user experience
site where they could go to get that authoritative information that Joe Klimavicz talked about
earlier. The lesson learned, really, was-- And GSA has a mature workforce, Casey excluded
from that. But there are some older people [laughter] that work there. To get them to
change to a work anywhere anytime and a browser interface when they're used to a fat client
that they've used for 20 years was a huge risk. That communication plan got them to
that comfort level where they could really take advantage of all the new stuff.
>>Presenter: Even when it's GroupWise? Isn't that what you were on?
>>Coleman: Lotus Notes.
>>Presenter: Oh, I'm sorry.
>>Coleman: But it was an old version of Notes, and it was one that we had a bunch of different
versions of the client. People didn't have an integrated work environment with their--
>>Presenter: I would think people would be just knocking down your doors, saying, "Get
me off of this thing first."
>>Coleman: Well, I told you, people were ready to make the move for a lot of reasons, including
the fact that the email architecture was unreliable. But yeah, there was a readiness for change.
>>Presenter: Alex, talk some about the challenges that you see in there, and with GSA, and also
the advantages of doing this. Because I know-- As I say, you see this on both sides of the
world, government and industry.
>>Diacre: I think Casey alluded to this, is the-- You've really got to look at some of
your existing policies. Look at connections with other groups within the organization.
Personnel departments, records management, legal teams. Really, it's time to review what
those policies are and see if they fit with your implementation decisions. It's not always
appropriate to just apply the same policies to the new technologies. It's sometimes very
difficult to do.
>>Presenter: From what I understand, GSA-- Well both of you, all three of you guys talked
about this, GSA is actually using the collaboration platform, which is really why you did this.
They're using-- They're being much more collaborative than really you anticipated.
>>Coleman: Right. This is not just about email, this really is about working differently.
We're using just about the entire Google apps for government suites. We've tried to make
as many of the features possible available to our users as possible. They are using the
docs, the sites, the chat, the instant messaging, and so forth. People are working in a much
more collaborative fashion. Now we are-- That's the default way we do collaboration, is co-editing
documents that are sitting in the cloud. It's been very productive.
>>Presenter: And you were telling me earlier that the amount of number docs that you've
shared is most of them, now.
>>Coleman: Yes, every document that's created is shared with on average three people. We've
had times when we've had spreadsheets or documents that are needed for some kind of agency wide
response of some sort where they'll be 50 to 100 people working on it at the same time.
Compare that with the difficulty of sending versions around and everyone makes changes
and tracks changes, and then some poor soul has to reconcile those. It's much more straightforward,
and the audit trail's much better.
>>Presenter: How important was the top level?
>>Coleman: Essential.
>>Presenter: How'd you go about getting that and then having them bless the process? Sometimes
you get the corner office and we'll say, "Oh yes, go do that" and then you don't see them
until they're saying, "Why did you do that?"
>>Coleman: We had, like I said, a readiness for change. GSA, as you alluded to in your
introduction, is an agency that seeks to be a leader in terms of employing technologies
and understanding how they can be used. We have a business type mission in that our mission
is to other federal agencies in supporting them with business services. We want to be
knowledgeable users so we can apply more appropriate solutions for our clients.
>>Presenter: Peter, how important was this from your side that you had a lot of senior
level approach, but also you knew GSA was very focused on this as well, all the way
down the chain?
>>Gallagher: I remember one meeting in particular where the administrator and all the execs
were there. We were also at the bumps in the road at the beginning. Because you're going
to have bumps in the road. This isn't something that you can throw over to a contractor and
say, "Do this." It's a team sport. There were no badges. There was people working together.
And the administrator said, I don't think I'm speaking at a school, she said, "20% of
the people aren't going to like this. They like what they have and they don't want to
change. We can't solve their problem." You have to be ready to take the fact that when
you change to a whole different paradigm of web-based computing, collaboration online,
some people aren't going to adapt to that. You have to be willing to take that heat and
those bumps. On the policy side, just one of the funny things that came up, is Google
sites has this really cool capability to build websites real quick, project sites. They can
lay a skin over the top of it. So from a policy perspective, some of those skins that are
available out there aren't that appropriate for a government agency.
>>Presenter: Yeah, baby.
>>Gallagher: Right? [laughter] There might be religious connotation. There were some
other ones which weren't really appropriate. How do you control those sorts of things?
New issues started coming up. But at the same time, with the leadership in place and these
integrated project teams, they make a decision, they move ahead. As Casey said, GSA's commercially
oriented. They know marketing and change. It was a great organization to take that first
leap.
>>Presenter: Alex, is that typical? Do you see about 20% of the people who are just those
curmudgeons that aren't going to do it?
>>Gallagher: I didn't say curmudgeons. [laughter]
>>Presenter: I think I just said curmudgeon.
>>Diacre: You know, there's a change curve. There's some adapting that needs to happen.
One of the things that's very powerful is to find things that users can grab onto. In
some cases, it's they're getting bigger mailboxes. In some cases, it's remote access. One of
the things we've seen a lot of success with, and GSA is no different, is with opening up
mobile devices. Suddenly, when you move to this new technology, there's a little more
diversity in the mobile devices that you can offer. I think that's a great way of gaining
buy-in of the user community. It's a little bit of a transition, but you get to use your
iPad too.
>>Presenter: I'm already hearing from people out there, saying, "Hold on." All of a sudden,
the way-- People I think two years ago were going, "Email in the cloud? No way!" All of
a sudden, the bring your own device, all this raises questions. How do you deal with that
and other things without being what I call the "CI-no." [laughter]
>>Coleman: We have opened up the environment because of the move to the cloud. It's a much
more suitable platform for supporting a variety of mobile devices. As a consequence of this,
in tandem with the move to the cloud, we deployed mobile device management software and began
allowing these with a few select devices based on Droid and iOS operating systems, Smartphones
and Tablets. There is now the ability to have a GSA-issue device that suits your work requirements,
perhaps a little bit more than in the past.
>>Presenter: I know that GSA has really looked at moving towards the paradigm where work
is something that you do, not a place that you go. It seems like this platform all of
a sudden empowers that in some real, fundamental way.
>>Coleman: It does, and it starts to create an expectation that now other apps need to
be mobile-enabled. So it's -- Trying to stay in front of that curve--
>>Presenter: It makes your job really easy.
>>Coleman: No. It does not make my job easy. [laughter] It makes it fun, but not easy.
>>Presenter: Peter, how do you go about-- Talk a little bit about the planning part.
Because all three of you said you have to spend a lot of time planning. People often
don't want to spend time planning, they want to get to it. How do you do that effectively?
>>Gallagher: We've done a lot of mission critical email transitions from different versions
to different platforms and things like this. This was our first major Google transition.
We had studied it, done it. We had great partners. I mentioned Tempus Nova. But really, what
you have to do is sit down and educate everybody upfront. Take the time with those integrated
project teams. We had a really nicely balanced set of-- We had IPTs around security, we had
IPTs around policy, we had IPTs around migration. There was basically an IPT with a GSA leader
who was meeting on a daily basis with his team, followed by a weekly meeting with primarily
Sonny's deputy who would make decisions and then pass them up the chain to a weekly meeting
with Casey. This cadence and the orchestration that you have to go through to move the 30
terabytes of data from-- Casey, fortunately, had already consolidated her email system
to one environment and one active directory server. But getting all that data to move
and be there on day 1 over time is a real orchestration. A lot of integration goes into
dual factor authentication, voice-over internet protocol, a whole bunch of stuff. Each of
those teams take responsibility independently. That's what got us there, I think.
>>Presenter: Did you do-- Joe was saying they did their roll out over a weekend. It actually--
From the time they signed the contract, it was six months later and they were done. He
was saying, "We don't normally do things that quickly." Speed, did it surprise you all?
And how did you actually do the roll out? Was it one of these weekend things where you
came back in on Monday, or did you do it in tranches? How did you approach that?
>>Coleman: We did it in about the same time frame. It took about six months from the time
the project kicked off until we went live. We had two small pilot groups. I called them
pacers. The first was a group of about 100 IT users, help desk and local support technologist
who would really need an in depth knowledge. They moved over into the new platform and
operated in both old and new for that period of time. About a month later, about 500 of
our pacers-- There were a lot of senior executives in that group, a lot of thought leaders and
change agents who volunteered to be part of that group. But then everyone else went live
almost a year ago. It was I think June 20th or 21st. We had moved all of their active
data before that time. The weekend beforehand, all we had to migrate was the last little
bit of messages that hadn't previously been moved over. So the actual risk was pretty
low, come Monday morning, that everyone would have their data in the new system. And it
did work.
>>Presenter: And again, you worked with folks so they weren't flooding the help desk. They
had other places to go for--
>>Coleman: That's right. We had a-- We saw a spike, as we expected, the first week. By
the second week, it was starting to go down. By the third week, the call volume to our
help desk had settled at a level below the previous normal, from the old system. Very
quickly, people adapted. What we did find is that of those people-- We ask everyone,
"Did you go to training?" when the called in, and of those who called the help desk
for assistance, 80% allowed us how they had not gone to training. Just proves the importance
of training and of people taking seriously their need to be ready.
>>Presenter: Training was not mandatory?
>>Coleman: It was mandatory.
>>Presenter: It was mandatory. [laughter]
>>Coleman: It was mandatory.
>>Presenter: Apparently voluntarily mandatory. [laughter]
>>Coleman: Let's say the enforce mechanisms were lacking. [laughter]
>>Presenter: They had to go to a conference in Vegas if they didn't go to--
>>Coleman: Oh, no.
[audience groans] [laughter]
>>Presenter: Come on, how can we-- Talk a little bit about the platform going forward.
What do you see coming out of all this work? Because I know there's a lot of stuff that
you're planning on working on in the future.
>>Coleman: We are looking forward to the deployment of Google Drive. As you know, it's like a
shared drive in the cloud, or your personal drive. We have observed, in previous years,
our growth in online storage that we managed in house was growing at about 30% a year.
2012 is the first year we have not had to buy additional storage for users, H drive,
and I drive, which is personal and shared online drives that we back up. That tells
you that all of a sudden, the move to cloud-based storage is happening voluntarily. We're looking
to take what's already in our GSA data centers and move that to cloud-based storage as a
way to further allow people to work from anywhere at anytime, have access to their critical
information. That's a key next step for us.
>>Presenter: Alex, as you see folks moving forward, does email just end up being the
first step, and then all of a sudden, I guess probably users, but also folks just say, "Okay,
why can't we do?"
>>Diacre: I think email's absolutely the first step. It's a big step. It gets everyone in
the organization on board, into the cloud, into the browser. We're seeing a lot of movement
from organizations moving custom applications into the cloud as well, using app engine from
Google, Amazon web services, to build custom apps that integrate into back-end systems.
I think that's going to be an area, particularly for enterprises, of significant movement in
the coming months and years.
>>Presenter: I've heard of agencies and organizations who move over to Google apps and then they
still use Outlook or some other client-based platform for the email. Why would they do
that?
>>Diacre: That's a great question. We have pretty rich support for other interfaces,
not just the web browser like IE and Firefox and Chrome, but also Outlook. We expose protocols
like IMAP for syncing in a multitude of devices. That's really what we want to do. We want
to give the users choice so they can choose the most comfortable UI for them. I think
the richest experience for us will always be in the browser. That's where the innovation
can happen really quickly. If you're working in Outlook, you have to wait for new releases,
new updates to either Outlook or to the connectors to get that functionality. The browser's the
place to be.
>>Presenter: Does it make it more complex if you do that? You've probably seen people
go both ways.
>>Diacre: It depends on the organization. Some organizations highly manage that. I don't
know, what do you see, Pete?
>>Gallagher: I want to say that we supported NOAA as well, in their implementation. NOAA,
I believe, at first was really encouraged in the use of the fat client. They had five
or six different fat clients: your Outlooks, your Firebirds, tools like that that people
were used to. I think they felt that the transition would be less dramatic if the folks could
still stick to those. But I think now--- You had some stats on the-- Didn't you? Of how
many people are moving towards the browser?
>>Diacre] It was interesting. What we saw in the beginning when they went live was about
70% of the users were in the fat client. About 30% were working on a web browser. If we now
look ahead, we're four or five months into that implementation, now, into that production
go-life. It's flipped the other way. Now we have about 30% working in Thunderbird, Outlook,
those kinds of clients, and 70% working inside of the browsers.
>>Presenter: It does make it a lot more complicated. Casey's team really went for the web interface,
with Chrome as the most secure browser that was built for this environment. That really
eased the training, it eased the outreach, it eased maintenance, it eased a lot of things.
It does make it easier if you make that decision, that that's what you're going to support.
>>Diacre: We did keep some users in thick clients for accessibility reasons and to provide
them with much less disruption as well.
>>Presenter: I know GSA always thinks about accessibility. Were there any challenges around
accessibility issues?
>>Coleman: Yeah. In general, a web browser is not going to be as rich a user experience
for a screen reader or accessibility program as a client application. That has nothing
to do with this platform, it's more about browser versus client. For those who needed
special accessibility considerations, we did give them Outlook as their client that backs
up into Google for email delivery.
>>Presenter: I didn't want to get away from security, but security. [laughter] Immediately,
when you talk cloud, people go, "Oh, it's not as secure as what we have." How did you
deal with the security challenge?
>>Coleman: I think it's important to start off by understanding that we're not starting
from a state of perfection ourselves. We're starting for a state of-- Security is a moving
target, and we always have more we can do. We worked with Google for about a year in
the process leading up to issuing them a FISMA Moderate authority to operate. We vetted their
controls very carefully. It's been a very close partnership since then to do the ongoing,
continuous monitoring. I would say that it's an important process to go through, and it's
also very, very important to understand what controls you as the client, as the customer,
are going to retain, and what controls you're going to rely upon the cloud provider to cover
for you. Within GSA, we've maintained the user authentication function. When you authenticate
with your badge into your GSA laptop, we authenticate you internally and hand you off through Samwell
to Google for email.
>>Presenter: Also, I keep hearing a lot of challenges around procuring cloud services.
It's a different way of buying stuff. You're lucky. You have a whole arm that focuses on--
>>Coleman: Great contracting officers with GSA.
>>Presenter: Yeah. How did you deal with that? All of a sudden, you're treating email as
a service, rather than-- It's a different way of looking at it.
>>Coleman: The whole team, from senior leadership to legal to [coughs] the contracting officers,
everyone we worked with, their perspective was, "How do we make this happen?" rather
than, "Let me tell you why this can't be done." It's all very doable. We've seen many, many
other agencies have done very similar things. It's just a matter of understanding the business
model changes and how to structure the contract appropriately. But we feel like we've got
a vehicle that is flexible where we need it to. It's got the right controls and safeguards
for us as the customer. We're very pleased with the way the procurement process went.
>>Presenter: And measuring success, as you-- Yeah, go ahead.
>>Gallagher: I just wanted to add to what Casey said.
>>Presenter: Yeah, absolutely.
>>Gallagher: One of the great things, this is a lesson learned for sure, one of the great
things they did in their acquisition is they had a statement of objectives, performance-based.
They didn't, for instance, list you must meet these 500 features that the typical COTS vendor
game is, of course, to list a bunch of detailed features that only their product meets. Well,
GSA didn't get stuck in that game. They said, "We want to go to the cloud. We want accessibility."
The one thing you have to have is security. We're very comfortable with that as an alternative.
As we said, Google has, as an alternative to in-house security, does a great job. Having
that procurement shaped in such a way that you can respond to it creatively with the
best value is what they did. Not all the agencies since have followed that process. It's interesting
to see the challenge is something that we've created in some cases. I don't think it's
there in a real sense anymore, because these guys broke down the barrier.
>>Presenter: Peter, any lessons learned? What would you guys have done differently if you
had to do it over again? Well, you have done it over again, but what did you do differently
with NOAA that you did with GSA?
>>Gallagher: We were subbed to a small business on NOAA. They went that way. I think what
I would do is really spend more time upfront with the leadership, so that they have time
to understand what the environment is, what the bumps are going to look like. Because
you're going to have bumps. GSA had to investigate this and research it for a long time. But
you're going to have bumps, and it is a big change. If you don't want to invest in all
that change management that GSA did-- It's a commercially oriented organization. They
can message real well. But if you don't have the capability, you really have to focus on
it, or you're not going to get the acceptance. That was our SLA from Casey, was to get the
product accepted. It wasn't just to move email over. That was the easy part. Technically,
that was easy. [laughs]
>>Presenter: Casey, anything you'd do over if you did it over again?
>>Coleman: You know, it sounds too simple to say that everything went smoothly. Things
did, for the most part, go very smoothly. We encountered a lot of technical complications
and worked through them pretty quickly. I think we had the right people on the team.
One of the things that it turned out to not go so smoothly right away, although we quickly
overcame it, was the migration of our wireless devices, predominantly Blackberries. We had
a plan, and we had a wizard-type process that would walk the users through making that transition
from connecting to the old platform to connecting to the new. But under the load that hit that
Monday morning, that wizard process failed. So we were scrambling for a backup mechanism.
It took us a day or two to get everyone moved over. Of course, people depend on those devices,
so moment by moment, that was a stressful sequence of events.
>>Presenter: Yeah. A lot of calls. Alex, anything that you'd do over again?
>>Diacre: One of the things Google did with the GSA project was we used it as an opportunity
to learn about government and large implementations and immerse ourselves in it. I think one of
the things, one of the key take-aways for us, it's not really a lesson learned but something
that we take into other large organizations, is the importance of having active executive
sponsorships. I think it's something Casey and her team did a really good job of. It's
a big best practice for us now, which is not just executive sponsorship and sign off, but
active engagement and participation throughout the project cycle. You mentioned weekly reviews
with you and your staff. I think that was really key to the success. We were able to
plow through issues. When there was a challenge or a decision to be made, it didn't fester
for a long time. It was surfaced and a decision was made by the executives.
>>Presenter: Is that different from your private sector clients?
>>Diacre: Depends on the organization. [laughs] It depends on the organization.
>>Presenter: Can you name names?
>>Diacre: I will not name names. [laughter] But we see a mix. It's something that we now,
if we start to engage with customers, commercial and government, is something that we put on
the table early on as a best practice. It's really important that the senior executives
participate in the project. It's a big change. Not just moving email systems, but moving
from an on premise architecture to a cloud architecture is big for everyone.
>>Gallagher: But Alex told me they invented the lexicon. Who's the Casey on this project?
[laughter] Who's the Sonny on this project? They're part of the training plan now, to
go to other clients.
>>Presenter: I should say introduce Sonny as your deputy.
>>Coleman: Yes. And executive in charge, who also is GSA's chief technology officer. He
ran the implementation.
>>Presenter: Alex, are there differences between how the government rolls this thing, needs
to roll this kind of project out, and how private sector does?
>>Diacre: You know, I think there were additional security considerations that need to be looked
at very carefully. It's really a policy alignment more than anything else. Commercial organizations
have that. They just-- Typically, they're less to find and less articulated, whereas
in the government space, there's a lot more people. But again, we had Bohm, we had Kurt
from GSA's CISO team, who again, actively participated. And like Casey said, it wasn't
discussions around how to not make it work. They came to the table with "Okay, what do
we need to do fix this? What do we need to do to make a decision to move ahead?"
>>Presenter: Casey, how do you deal with the folks that are heavy users of Gmail. I think
a lot of people think Gmail and what you guys are all about is the same thing. They're not.
It's a unique product. How do you deal with those folks who go, "Okay, I want to have
Google Hangout or Google Plus or all those other great things that I can do on my personal
account, I want to do those at work, too."
>>Coleman: We talked about the change laggards who are never going to be happy. You also
have the early adopters who are--
>>Presenter: Who are probably never going to be happy.
>>Coleman: --who are also never going to be happy because we do not give access to every
single feature. We study the-- test the security features, test for compliance with our own
requirements, and turn on most but not all. There is a forum for people to talk about
those things. We do try to communicate to them what our road map is. If there's a reason
not to activate a feature, we talk about that. But at the end of the day, you just have to
be aware that they're not going to be 100% happy. They ought to be much more satisfied
than in the days when they had so many less features. So we try to keep that in context.
>>Presenter: We're out of time. Is there a takeaway about cloud, about for CIOs who are
thinking about maybe stepping into this environment?
>>Coleman: Well, just to return to your introduction about GSA putting all its employees on email,
that was a big thing at the time. Email was a novelty. Cloud is a bit of a novelty now,
but it will very, very quickly, I think, become the de facto way that we do business. The
operating model for IT in general. It's very doable. I think that it offers significant
opportunities for innovation and for cost savings. It's one of those things that IT
professionals have to stay in front of, or else they'll find the organizations that they
support moving out ahead of them.
>>Presenter: Yeah, and being caught left behind. Thank you very much. I joked about the whole--
GSA has taken a lot of heat over the last six months. Unfortunately, a very small number
of people have sullied the otherwise amazing work that most of GSA does. Thank you for
doing this. Thank you for being here. Thanks guys.
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