Editor’s Note: We launched our Google Apps community map in March 2010, and have since received thousands of Gone Google stories from organizations around the world. We’ll be showcasing some of these stories in a new series of blog posts, Going Google Everywhere.
Today we welcome Mark Goble, COO of Goble & Associates, an integrated marketing agency servicing the healthcare industry. Has your company “Gone Google” and interested in sharing your story? Add your marker to the map!
Goble & Associates is a 27 year old global marketing agency with clients in the medical device, diagnostic, and pharmaceutical businesses. Our commitment to collaboration and communication has been the cornerstone of our success, with client relationships that average over eight years, which is rare in our business. As our agency has doubled in size over the past four years, our IT resources were increasingly consumed with managing our outdated systems, and we needed solutions that would enable us to continue to deliver the same levels of customer service that our clients had come to expect.
Our IT challenges were considerable. Our expansion to nearly 100 employees – including offices in Chicago and San Diego, plus mobile workers – had left us without a central calendaring system, and our in-house email support was costly and time consuming to maintain. When we added mobile access by rolling out iPhones to more than 20 employees, we realized our infrastructure was unable to support mobile solutions, and we knew it was time for a change.
Enter Google Apps. We migrated to Apps in early 2009, and have subsequently converted an additional organization we acquired. The results have exceeded our expectations. Six months after going Google, we saw an 80% reduction in IT issues related to email, while saving more than 23% in hardware costs. Additionally, we estimate our mobile efficiency has increased more than ten-fold.
While our initial pain points were focused on email and calendaring, we’ve experienced huge benefits from Docs and Sites. Docs has become the centerpiece of our daily communications regarding project status, and we’re actively using Google Sites to help manage our business, including a company-wide start page with integrated calendar and Twitter feed:
We’ve also found ways to utilize Sites to assist in our continued focus to be the best partner to our clients. We recently developed a Site to provide a potential client insight into our immersion and research process, which was instrumental in helping us prepare to win this business. Going Google has also reinvigorated our client-centric focus, as our IT team now has the resource to assist our development team in building new client solutions.
Using cloud-based solution like Google Apps has greatly enhanced our business operations; so much so that we’ve extended our cloud computing initiative to include Google Apps Marketplace providers such as TripIt. We eagerly await the adoption of new technologies like Google Wave that will continue to place Goble & Associates at the forefront of the technology and communications curve.
Posted by Colleen Horan, Google Enterprise team
