Avanade Looks to Boost Business Productivity with Infrastructure Upgrades

As a consulting organization, Avanade has a highly mobile, distributed workforce that regularly works outside the corporate offices at customer sites, or other locations. For Avanade's IT group, this mobility has meant that maintaining and improving employee collaboration and overall productivity through IT systems is a constant goal.

One priority is to ensure that employees who are working outside the office can connect to the corporate network to check their e-mail and access internal resources. Today, employees use a virtual private network (VPN) to access their e-mail while away from the office. But this approach is not failsafe, as sometimes the security systems at customer sites restrict access and limit the availability of e-mail.

A second area of focus is making access to documents easier and faster. For Avanade's Ryan Sokolowski, Microsoft Early Adopter Manager, "effectively mining the considerable depth of Avanade intellectual property is key to the efficiency of our consultants and the value we can deliver to our customers. Avanade has hundreds of gigabytes of information in our project workspaces, and we've got a serious need for our consultants to effectively search and locate relevant documents related to previous projects. However, our consultants may work on multiple customer engagements simultaneously, and as they bounce back and forth between locations, they need to be able to find and share information with each other, collaborating to provide better service to those customers."

New technology adoption offers productivity improvements

One way that Avanade has looked to boost productivity has been by staying ahead of the technology curve and exploring how advances in infrastructure products can help maximize employee performance. The company has been a frequent early adopter of Microsoft technologies, and it quickly recognized several key benefits it could take advantage of in the next wave of Microsoft products: Windows Vista, Exchange Server 2007 and Office System 2007.

"Organizationally, Avanade's culture is one where new technology is embraced. Consultants are eager to adopt and learn about new technologies and in fact, one of our company values is about having 'passion for technology.' Knowing this, our IT organization felt that giving employees early access to the latest Microsoft technologies would have an immediate impact on their productivity and satisfaction levels," says Sokolowski.

To enable employees to access the next wave of Microsoft technologies, Avanade performed a series of pilots to explore migration strategies plus observe benefits across a pool of employees. First it performed a pilot for upgrades to Windows Vista and Microsoft Office. Employees could opt-in to participate in the pilot, with more than 500 choosing to do so worldwide.

Next, Avanade piloted a migration to Exchange Server 2007 with about 100 employees selected to represent a cross-section of its workforce. Avanade also piloted Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, using it to upgrade one intranet repository, called the Solutions Portal, previously hosted on SharePoint 2003, and enabling all employees to benefit from new functionality such as blogging.

Benefits

For Avanade, providing this early access to new technologies for its employees has yielded increased collaboration across groups and has meant higher levels of service to its customers. Specifically, the early adoption project revealed the following benefits:

• Increased collaboration between Avanade users across geographical boundaries through the capabilities of Windows Vista and Office SharePoint Server 2007. For example, users can create workspaces and manage permissions on SharePoint, all without IT intervention. These workspaces allow employees to share and collaborate on documents with anyone in the company.
  
  Furthermore, employees had improved access to the corporate network from remote locations. Using Office Outlook Web Access, they were able to connect to Avanade's SharePoint Server 2007 sites to download shared documents and bypass the regular method of access via VPN.
  
  
• Lower TCO and reduced IT burden through technologies that enable employees to be more self-sufficient in their collaboration with colleagues worldwide. For Avanade IT, this has mean significant savings in time, both from a reduction in the number of helpdesk calls, but also from easier deployments of the new technology, improved security management and more flexibility for data backups.
  
  
• Enhanced user productivity through improved connectivity to the Avanade workspace. With Exchange 2007, Avanade users have an easier time keeping their smart phones or other mobile devices in synch with their corporate e-mail.
  
  Additionally, results from the Solutions site pilot built on SharePoint Server 2007 reveal benefits in improved search capabilities. "We can search our corporate LAN as quickly as the Internet. It used to take more than a minute to get results from a search—and those results often lacked relevance. Now, our systems are returning narrowed-down, useful results within one second," noted Sokolowski.
  
  
• Last, Avanade's early adoption revealed ways the company could improve security and compliance. The security benefits were especially appealing in light of Avanade's highly remote and distributed workforce. Previously, if a smart phone user connected to the Avanade network lost their device, an IT administrator had to remotely wipe the information on the device. Users of the new technologies however, were able to wipe their own devices in such an event, without the need to contact IT. Also, with Windows Vista features such as Windows BitLocker Drive Encryption, Avanade would be able to better protect sensitive information in the event an employee laptop were lost or stolen with full-volume data encryption.
  
  Avanade would also have new ways to ensure compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley through functionality that enables the company to set policies for document retention and deletion.

With these encouraging results, Avanade decided to invest in migrating its entire workforce of more than 5,600 people to the new technology platform. Using the results of the pilots as a foundation for planning, Avanade is currently in the midst of outlining plans that will bring these benefits to the reach of all its employees.