• Delivers reliable performance, uptime, and security of collaboration-enabling systems

• Enables employees to focus on increasing productivity without being concerned about storage limits and backup

• Allows employees to retain large files such as drawings and graphics

After completing a proof of concept with Google Workspace in early 2013, Mass Rapid Transit Corporation decided its cloud-based intelligent applications were the best fit for the business. It engaged Google Premier Partner Matrix Connexion to complete the technical and change management elements of the migration. "Matrix Connexion demonstrated strong commitment to complete the project smoothly," says Azaime. The partner and Mass Rapid Transit Corporation delivered the migration in less than one month.

The partner initially conducted change management with a group of pilot users before extending to other staff members.

"As well as technical and project management expertise from Matrix Connexion, we received very strong support for our work from the top management of the organization – our leaders engaged closely with the project to ensure its success," says Azaime.

Mass Rapid Transit Corporation has taken over from the partner and now runs Google Workspace training sessions for all staff. "We conduct regular Google Workspace training," says Azaime. "This is part of our continuous effort to update employees on the applications and how they can better use them for their day-to-day operations. As a result, our employees are becoming more aware of how these tools can benefit them. They are becoming more independent, hence reducing their reliance on IT for innovation. Seeing them implement their own innovations is priceless!"

Following the initial deployment, continued growth in design and construction activities meant some engineers' email storage was fully utilized just six months after the initial deployment of Google Workspace.

"Over the following few years, we saw this trend starting to accelerate," says Azaime. By the end of 2017, Mass Rapid Transit Corporation decided to upgrade to Google Workspace for Business, principally to access more storage for services such as Gmail and Drive.

With Google Workspace for Business now established within Mass Rapid Transit Corporation, staff collaboration and productivity is continuing to improve.

The business now uses a range of Google Workspace applications, including Calendar, Google Meet, and Sites as well as Gmail and Drive. "These services help us transform the way we operate and collaborate," says Azaime. "Managing and accessing files anywhere and anytime without worrying about storage limits is key to driving more initiatives and increasing productivity."

"Advances in Drive in particular are winning enthusiastic internal support," he adds. "Most of our engineers work at remote sites, so being able to access common files from a single location is invaluable. Furthermore, they can update spreadsheets through Sheets and documents through Docs without having to deal with multiple iterations and versions. They also are now proactively looking to find out what additional tools are available to them through Google Workspace."

In late 2017, Mass Rapid Transit Corporation also started looking at better ways to visualize and present data to support senior management decision-making. Having experienced the stability, performance, and functionality of Google Workspace, investigating Google Cloud Platform offerings was an obvious step for the organization. The business settled on Google Data Studio to make key reports interactive and powerful. "The tool is a great way of making data beautiful and accessible to managers," says Azaime. "Management was so pleased they gave us the green light to use Data Studio to visualize other data and reports across the business."

The technology team then engaged with other departments to make Google Data Studio pervasive across the organization. "We convinced several teams to use Data Studio," says Azaime. "We were surprised after a while when some of the staff members who took the journey with us started developing dashboards without our involvement. We regard this as one of our biggest achievements to date as a technology team and we plan to encourage more people to become champions of Data Studio within their departments."

Mass Rapid Transit Corporation is achieving these benefits while being what Azaime describes as "quite comfortable" with the costs involved, and achieving a level of stability that meets the organization's requirements.

The organization is now working with Matrix Connexion to use App Maker to build applications that fill gaps within its operations, and further explore the opportunities Google Cloud Platform presents. "Google gives us a dynamic platform to improve our flexibility and performance and become more effective in delivering our infrastructure projects," says Azaime. "Google Cloud offered more than we expected – it is a value-for-money solution! Downtime, stability, and performance issues are now all in the past. Google Cloud has completely changed our IT landscape and we can now deliver more value-added services to our users."