About Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg
Based in Belgium, Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg offers guidance and assistance in Elderly care, Nursing care and Psycho-geriatric care at home. Their mission is to provide people with an array of high quality, accessible and specialised health care services. These include professional nursing care at home, individual customised care packages and several additional healthcare services.
With around 1,850 employees, Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg focuses on having the most efficient and professional care team available for their 34,831 patients.
Google Workspace removes silos, which gives more space to creative work and efficient collaboration
Kris Lowet
IT Manager, Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg
The Problem
A couple of years ago Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg decided to make the move to Google Workspace from their Microsoft legacy system, focusing initially on Gmail and Google Calendar. When making this move, they didn’t officially announce it, nor did they give any training on Google Drive to their workforce.
This led to the employees discovering Google Drive on their own. They started using the system to improve the collaboration within their teams.
Employees still used their Microsoft Windows file servers as the official platform for the company to exchange documents. But due to the flexibility of Google Drive, they decided to utilise both platforms at work.
Despite recognising the benefits of using Google Drive, Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg found that the regular Google Drive folders became a risk for the organisation: files could get lost when individual users would leave the business and when their accounts would be deactivated.
Moreover, the users had duplicate folder structures in Google Drive and the on-premise file system, and therefore didn’t know where the most up to date documents were located. There was also a risk of users seeing too little or too much information due to the extended permissions model of Google Drive.
The Goal
Apart from the general goal of collaborating more efficiently within and between teams, the goal was to unify the file sharing within the organisation within only one platform. At the same time, the unified file sharing platform would have to ensure the security and data loss prevention of the file sharing and collaboration.
Solution
With Google’s announcement of Team Drives -now called Shared Drives-, Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg saw the opportunity to finally make full use of the Google Drive platform as their sole, and secure, enterprise file sharing solution.
Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg needs to ensure that collaboration throughout the organisation is optimal, in order to provide their patients with the specialised healthcare they require. Therefore, they rightfully see collaboration as an essential need for the business.
As the healthcare organisation already found Google Workspace for email and Calendar extremely useful and intuitive, it was clear for them that Google Shared Drives (previously “Team Drives”) would be a key feature they needed to improve teamwork and collaboration.
Moreover, it would bring them the security they need from a file sharing system with a lot of users who are working from different locations.
That’s why Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg decided to move away from their on-premise file servers by migrating all their files and data to Google Shared Drives.
Methodology
Although you need to tackle some technical aspects to transition from a classic file server environment like Microsoft to Google Team Drives, it’s not where our main focus goes to at Fourcast. When implementing a Google technology like this, the focus rather lies on change management. This is because Google Drive opens up the way towards a new way of working with its real-time collaboration and AI capabilities.
Change Management is all about making sure the people, in this case the Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg employees, change their work behaviour. One way we did this at Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg is by appointing Google Ambassadors within the company.
Ambassadors are employees that we train to provide various training sessions to employees in the company that migrates to Google Workspace. They make sure everyone knows the new tools and how to work with them. These ambassadors also communicate about the new technology within the company through various channels and will be the central point of contact for questions. They are the ones that can identify some quick wins, like simplifying the process of managing training subscriptions.
The roll-out itself happened in three phases. First we validated the technical impact of the migration to Shared Drives by transitioning the IT department. After that, we migrated our Ambassadors who play a key role in the further roll-out. Finally, we migrated the entire company to Google Shared Drives.
The Result
Now that Wit-Gele Kruis Limburg is using Shared Drives, they notice that the migration brought more clarity and flexibility to everyone in the organisation.
Giving the caretakers on the road the capability to access the necessary information to their job while being on the road, wherever they are, is a huge asset that makes their work easier and more valuable.
As such, the whole organisation works more efficiently together now and benefits from the change to Google Shared Drives.