CIO describes how he moved 125K workers to Office 365 in 6 months

by Volker Weber

The CIO of Swiss power company ABB shared details with CIO.com about its decision to ditch IBM Notes and move 125,000 workers to Office 365. The migration spotlighted important lessons for IT leaders about the scalability of enterprise tools and how innovation can drive staff productivity.

More >

Comments

Announced April 2013. Now it's November 2015. That's 2.5 years.
Add the time before the announcement.
Multiply time needed with staff involved, add money spent.

I could drive from Munich to Hamburg, hop out of the car short before getting there and then claim "Starting in Munich, it only took me a minute to walk to Hamburg".

And "wow!" "Yammer lets co-workers find colleagues and see if they're available and then start conversations". Amazing!

4 years at least, lots of staff, lots of money.

The one thing I do agree with is "how innovation can drive staff productivity".

Florian Vogler, 2015-11-25

Check out the Panasonic announcement from Lotusphere 2010. Where are they now?

Volker Weber, 2015-11-25

I see that Andy Tidd worked for IBM between 2003 and 2007. There may have been more pain with the migration than is shown in the article.

Jay Marme, 2015-11-25

Why would you want to jump ship and take the risk falling in the ocean and drowning?
It takes a good Captain, good maintenance on the ship and a great crew to make sure the ship's direction takes you anywhere you want to go

Wannes Rams, 2015-11-26

Florian, I loved your comment so much I had to read it out in the office.Thanks for making me laugh.

Andre Hausberger, 2015-11-26

Couldn't agree more with you, Wannes... . It's like with most things those days : buy new instead of keeping the current working. Not always for the best unfortunately.

Mathieu Pape, 2015-11-26

Sorry that sort of shortened story makes me cry. Every time. Which is often. And Volker I saw a lot of people jumping the ship. All jumpers expierience the same, every time they turn around and look back they see the old ship still tied up to the new one.

Henning Kunz, 2015-11-26

Asbestos removal is difficult. Easy to get in, hard to get out. We know that.

Volker Weber, 2015-11-26

Henning, the ship will become a boat and then shrink until it fits your bathtub. And then it will ge gone one day. But it will.

i see this in our company, we moved between Easter and September appr. 10k users globally from Notes to O365 for mail/calendar/contacts and reconfigured 1.600 managed mobiles from connecting to Traveler to O365. The migration was 6 months for us in the project, parallel to an AD migration. Now we start using OneDrive and Sharepoint and begin terminating Notes applications. Not to mention that we heavily trim down the Domino environment as we go. Notes will be gone sooner than later and the sadness of having left it disappears fast when people see what O365 can do for them. Not everything is better, many things are different but overall, when you want to get a different way of work into the company this can be one way to drive such change.

Armin Auth, 2015-11-26

Everything that is new is somehow shiny and attractive. It's only time that shows if it remains that way and proves it is/isn't better than the previous experience ;-)

Mathieu Pape, 2015-11-26

Mathieu, the ugly truth is that when you have decided to move out, you hardly turn back. And it is nowhere stated that the new thing has to be better, being different may be just right. This includes also the delivery model (on prem vs. Cloud).

Armin Auth, 2015-11-26

I would hope that "being different" ends up measurably better = makes more economic sense overall. If it's just different at a high cost then I think the money can - if not should - be spent better.
Arguably, feeling better can pay back, too. Hopefully it does.
If we were all bored to death I'd vote for ditching systems in all directions day in day out, there's so much to try! If we aren't, I'm all in favor of adding whatever you need to add to your current mix and transform along (yes that includes anything from anyone if it adds value). Same result in the long run, but with more diversity, and much more agile. The days of monolithic "this or that" are long over.

Florian Vogler, 2015-11-26

Two fallacies:

- your favorite platform is superior
- other people are stupid

Volker Weber, 2015-11-26

Smart, Volker.
Makes it hard to share any thoughts, because you can easily want to put anyone - very much including myself - into either category. That leaves little to no room for improvement on both ends of the spectrum.
My gut feeling of this entire thread was not that anyone said MS is bad and IBM is not, or the opposite. I think it was a good mix.

Florian Vogler, 2015-11-27

When i read this customer case a few days ago it brought back good memories. I sometimes think of all the Lotus Notes vs Microsoft discussions we've had over on edbrill.com ... Those were the days 😀

Peter de Haas, 2015-11-28

Hadoop online training .All the basic and get the full knowledge of hadoop.
hadoop online training

hadoop online training , 2016-08-31

Old vowe.net archive pages

I explain difficult concepts in simple ways. For free, and for money. Clue procurement and bullshit detection.

vowe

Paypal vowe