Forrester Groundswell Awards Entry: Fidelity Bank of Ghana Going Google Summary Fidelity Bank of Ghana uses Google Apps for Business to rise above technology roadblocks that were interfering with employees’ ability to do their jobs efficiently. To solve this problem, and set itself apart from others in the market, the bank moved to a platform that allowed it to leapfrog from outdated and unreliable systems to Google’s cloud-based technology, which offers greater security and functionality and enables employees to collaborate and work more efficiently, from anywhere and anytime. Previously, network outages, which are common in West Africa, would shut down operations for hours at a time. Now, employees at the bank do not have work interruptions, are more productive and provide better service to customers. The move to Google Apps transformed the culture at Fidelity Bank of Ghana in three key ways: increased productivity, collaboration and flexibility. Increased productivity: By moving crucial business operations to Google Apps, Fidelity Bank of Ghana benefits from Google’s 99.9 percent uptime, so employees can rely on having 24/7 access to important documents, email and communication tools. This move directly contributed to an average of 15% time savings for the entire company. Since all information is securely stored in the cloud, employees can keep up with work while traveling, which was not previously possible. Ease of collaboration: Many employees at the Fidelity Bank of Ghana don’t have phones at their desks, so real-time communication was challenging. They had to rely on email or use their personal cell phones for communicating with each other. When the bank introduced Google Hangouts to the company, it spread across the company virally. By setting up Hangouts, communication and collaboration have been greatly improved, with fewer formal meetings required to come to consensus. Formal meetings have been replaced with real-time, face-to-face conversations via Hangouts. Enhanced flexibility: Fidelity Bank of Ghana has a long history of having an open, bring your own device (BYOD) policy. The problem, however, was that employees couldn’t access important documents if they were working remotely or from personal laptops, tablets or smartphones. The result was that while management allowed a BYOD policy, it wasn’t really feasible because employees could not access information from those devices. Now, having shifted to Google Apps, employees have the flexibility to access information from their preferred device, and from their preferred location, which has greatly increased productivity. About Fidelity Bank of Ghana Fidelity Bank of Ghana is the sixth-largest commercial bank in Ghana, with 1,200 employees at 45 branches across the country serving 400,000 customers. The company prides itself on offering its customers speed, security and simplicity, while simultaneously offering employees a productive, flexible and collaborative work environment. This vision has contributed to the company’s growth as the west African banking industry continues to evolve. Fidelity Bank of Ghana was motivated to change its business processes because under the solution it was previously using, the company was unable to realize that vision. Consistent downtimes were compromising the speed, security and simplicity the company aspired to offer its customers, and a set of collaborative and flexible tools that would empower employees to work together from across the world, on any device, was not yet available. The shift to Google Apps changed this. The Problem Fidelity Bank of Ghana was running on a legacy email server/client and experiencing constant, sometimes unresolvable downtimes, with some employees and even managers skirting corporate policy by using personal email accounts for official communications as a last resort. Systems were down for hours at a time, causing work to grind to a halt and compromising the security of account holder information while the system was being fixed. Not only was the system unreliable, but it lacked the functionality necessary to operate in the global economy of commercial banking. Employees couldn’t read email or access the company’s system while away from their desks. For employees who travel for work, that meant being completely disconnected while away from the office. It also forced them to spend several days after a trip sorting through hundreds of unread emails, often missing critical communications. Collaboration across teams was also incredibly difficult. One employee, Fidelity Bank of Ghana’s head of ATM card management, used to receive 44 separate email attachments a week from various branches and would have to enter the contents of each manually into a master document. The company was paying expensive maintenance for a system that was out of date, unreliable, hindered productivity and increased operating costs. Faced with the prospect of paying even more to upgrade to a more recent version system that they were convinced would be just as unreliable, the company looked elsewhere for an IT solution. The Shift Fidelity Bank of Ghana had a choice -- spend the money to upgrade to a more recent version and risk the same unreliability and system downtime, or look elsewhere. A change needed to be made; the firm’s executives were determined to find a solution that offered a lower cost, increased security, guaranteed uptime and a set of tools that allowed employees to work collaboratively within a flexible work environment. They decided to try out Google Apps. Here’s how they did it: The company uploaded all intranet files to Google Drive. With 30 GB of space per user, employees were able to securely transfer all files on their desktop to Drive—reducing the risk of having important files lost or stolen if employees misplaced their work computers. All emails were transferred to Gmail prior to the go-live date. Employees were taught how to use Hangouts for informal communications, drastically reducing the number of formal weekly meetings and allowing employees across different branches to have face-to-face conversations. Employees were shown how to integrate Google Apps into their smartphones, enabling “access anywhere, anytime” work mobility. Various departments set up master spreadsheets where teams could simultaneously update and share information in real-time without having to individually send updates in the form of large attachments. Google Forms were implemented for branches to report weekly activities. This automated process saves one ATM card program manager two days of work per week. The company also created microsites to serve as collaborative hubs for individual departments. Business Impact Adopting Google Apps has led to massive breakthroughs in productivity, efficiency, time and cost savings, security, mobility and collaboration. Specifically, the benefits include: Improved company culture: Culture of collaboration: Employees now communicate more effectively and faster– from being confined to in-person conversations and unreliable emails, to having up to 12 chat windows open at once. Since constant collaboration has increased, the need for formal meetings has been drastically reduced. Culture of BYOD: Enabling work from any device has boosted the BYOD trend and created a flexible work environment. Time savings averages 15% per worker, with some as high as 40%. Increased speed of decision making resulting from the ease of data collection. Mobile access to emails has vastly improved employees’ ability to work on the fly, preventing communications from falling through the cracks. Increasing accountability by eliminating occurrences of “I didn’t see the email.” Reduced frequency of formal meetings by easing remote collaboration. Seamless transition, with no interruption to productivity. 5-year cost of IT has been reduced by 40%, as well as simplified to an annual subscription to Google rather than purchasing and maintaining in-house servers and storage in an on-premise data center. Overall operating costs reduced by 30%. System uptime is at Google’s guaranteed 99.9%. Security is vastly improved with Google’s SAS 70 certified solution “Moving over to Google Apps has drastically increased collaboration and accountability on our team,” said Suresh K L, Chief Information Officer at Fidelity Bank of Ghana. “I often see employees with 12 or more chat windows open at once! Hangouts—with the instant chat feature—have completely changed the way we work together. The work environment at Fidelity Bank of Ghana has become a much more collaborative place and this has, in turn, decreased the need for meetings. Also, since moving over to Google Apps, I haven’t heard a phrase that used to be far too common in the office—‘I didn’t get your email.’”
Posted on: Fri, 30 Aug 2013 20:17:02 +0000
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