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Creating a Unified Cloud Productivity Environment for the City of Brighton, Colorado

An Inflection Point for an Ageing IT Infrastructure

The City of Brighton, Colorado is comprised of 20 different city government departments that employ over 500 individuals. With a population of over 40,000 people, the city is tasked with effectively working together to support each department’s mission in order to aid their community and enable effective cross-functional IT solutions.

Technology
The Problem
The Solution
The Result
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The Problem

In the middle of the 2010s, The City of Brighton found itself at a technology inflection point. The city was operating on an ageing, hybrid IT infrastructure, which had been cobbled together over the course of the previous decade. Half of the city’s users were using an on-prem MS Exchange email server, while the other half of the users were working in Office 365.

This decentralized infrastructure created complexity with systems integration and communication, IT planning, and budgeting between each individual department.

The city commissioned a study to evaluate Office 365 and Google Workforce (formally G Suite) as potential unified, cloud-based email solutions with the goal of enhancing communication and collaboration across all of its government services that would also provide cost savings and a long-term positive return on investment (ROI).

The Solution

As their evaluation came to a close, KSM Consulting worked closely with the City of Brighton to identify their IT and business requirements, security and compliance requirements, and establish integration points between the state’s legacy systems and a Google Workspace solution.

KSMC mapped the business processes with application functionality and designed a comprehensive change management strategy to prepare each user for the coming change. Training was delivered on each application with role-based training for every individual working in the City of Brighton’s government entities.

KSMC integrated each department’s individual directories with GoogleCloud Directory Sync (GCDS) to enable the automatic provisioning and de-provisioning of users. This allowed for seamless communication between every division within the city’s government.  The total migration consisted of email, calendar, and contact data using the CloudMigrator tool for 560 employees within a compressed six-week span.

In addition, KSMC also led change management sessions that enabled the city’s departments to customize communication templates for their end-users.

 

“Overall, I was impressed with the services we received throughout the implementation process. The cohesive collaboration between KSM Consulting and Google was evident and the responsiveness from both parties was appreciated. The experience was one that demonstrated professionalism, technical expertise, and a good understanding of our business process.”

– David Guo, Director of IT, City of Brighton

The Result

The City of Brighton, Colorado began the deployment Google Workspace (formally G Suite) citywide to its 560 users in September of 2018 and officially went live in December 2018. KSM Consulting’s Google Certified Deployment Specialists configured the G Suite domain and services for use, set up Google Vault, provisioned users, and implemented Google Cloud Directory Sync (GCDS).

Our Google Migration Specialists engineered the migration tool, CloudMigrator, to migrate email, calendar, and contact data for the City of Brighton’s 560 employees from a variety of platforms to Google Workspace (formally G Suite).

KSMC’s Google Certified Trainers and change management specialists developed targeted communication to all end users to notify and prepare them for their new email platform transition. In addition, we delivered a series of training sessions for administrators and end-users in a virtual instructor-led training (VILT) format. Deployment, go-live support, and project management services were provided throughout the duration of the project.

As a result of these Google platform initiatives, the City of Brighton has achieved a rolling return on investment and improved overall communication and efficiency amongst city staff. The Google Workspace migration provided a path to cost avoidance by eliminating the higher costs of maintaining their ageing, hybrid infrastructure and focusing instead on a unified solution that easily outperformed their previous systems.

 

This case study was originally shared on TempusNova.com. KSM Consulting acquired Tempus Nova, a 20-year-old, award-winning consultancy that exclusively provides Google Cloud solutions and implementation consulting across the nation, in early 2021. Identified by CIO Review as one of the Top 10 Most Promising Google Consulting Services Companies in 2019, Tempus Nova is a Google Cloud Premier Partner and a GCP Premiere Partner. Further, it is a Google Certified Training Organization and has migrated more applications to Google App Engine than any other Google partner.