The Missing Element In Adopting Google Apps

I have blogged several times that cultural change is required in order to fully realize the benefits of adopting Google Apps. But what does this actually mean. At a recent event in Melbourne, Australia, Google presenters talked about shifting from individual to team productivity and I fully agree with this. But what does it actually mean.

A recent situation made me realise that making such a cultural shift is not as easy as it sounds. During a recent project, I was faced with continually updating the status of a list of items which was changing throughout the day. That's easy, just create a shared document in Google docs and share it with the 6 people who were performing the various activities and make use of the collaborative features in Google Docs.

The first problem was two of the 6 team members were external to the organisation who by the way was not a Google Apps shop. 1 external member and 1 internal team member did not have Gmail accounts which meant that they could not access the spreadsheet to share . Ok with some persuasion, I got them to create their own Gmail accounts and away we went.... well sort of.

They were fine with the idea of always seeing the most up-to-date information since everyone was working on the single document. It was when they needed to collaborate together that the cultural change became immediately obvious. Here is a list of some of the things I saw happening:

1. Changing the colour of the text that they had changed to indicate to the others that they had made a change (these individuals just did not appreciate that the versions capabilities already does this)
2. Sending an email instead of using the comment and discussion features. When asked why they did that, the answer quite simply was that they were used to doing this by email - yes those of you who are Google Docs users know that they discussion feature is easy and simple.
3. Only 2 team members said that they used the integrated chat facility even though they could see that some other team members we online. These same two team members were also the only two who used Voip capabilities of chat. The others just picked up the phone or used Microsoft Office Communicator

This would have been understandable if we had been talking about conservative users who were not really into technology. However the surprise is that we are talking about a bunch of IT managers. What this confirms is that change, and in particular behavioural change is no easy. Here are some possible reasons for what I observed:

1. Business users are very Microsoft Office centric and were attempting to do the same thing in the same way with Google Docs. In fact almost half the team were operating as if they had sent out the document and were expecting to meet up to "synchronise" the latest status via a telephone conference
2. The leader of the team himself acted as if Google Docs was a one for one alternative for Microsoft Word. 
3. This organisation does in fact use Microsoft Sharepoint but in the majority of cases, documents are checked out an never checked back in for the next person which leads team members to make a copy of the document and work on the copy.

I could go on but you get the point. My biggest mistake was assuming that they were IT people they would "get it" and the experience would be great. But this was hardly the case. And this I think is the problem with many Google Apps deployments. The IT folk focus on the more technical aspects like email migration and the business users think in terms of replacements for Microsoft Office and possibly Sharepoint. Hardly anyone I have come across considers the changes to the work practices and the way teams work together.

Interestingly what I did find was that the individuals who had children at university or collage seem to have a better grasp of what I was going on about with culture and behavioural change. Their kids who need to work in groups to complete term assignments love the collaborative components of Google Docs. They do get that it is a far more effective way of working together. This is the Facebook generation. The though of different people working on different copies of the document is not natural to them and these are the ones will start to seed the workplace. Until this generation starts to dominate the workplace, it will require a concerted and conscious effort to introduce the existing workers to this new way of working. Without this behavioural change, the benefits to a small business of adopting Google Apps including Google Docs will never be fully realised.

This is not in fact difficult, it just needs to be recognised and taken into consideration when planning any Google Apps deployment