Geneva Business School: Empowering the business leaders of tomorrow with collaborative mindsets
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Education is about more than just imparting information. For the Geneva Business School (GBS), education is about teaching the necessary skills to adapt, survive, and thrive in the world after pupils have graduated. With a diverse, international student body spread out over five campuses, the school prides itself on fostering leadership, communication, and productivity skills as well as academic achievement. In 2016, GBS began searching for ways to help its students work together and improve communication. To do that, it turned to Google Workspace for Education.
“We wanted our content stored in a digital environment where the students could collaborate on projects even when working remotely,” says Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director at Geneva Business School. “For us the solution was Google Workspace.”
Improving collaboration, increasing accountability
Prior to 2016, GBS’ online course components were designed to be worked on individually. Students could download course materials from extranet sites to work offline on traditional word processing and spreadsheet software. If they were working together, they had to be physically in the same room or would communicate over email. GBS places a strong emphasis on collaborative work, but in such a fragmented setup, it could be hard for professors to work out exactly who had contributed what in each group.
“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class. Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”
Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer, Geneva Business School
For GBS, the solution came from its Barcelona campus, which has a reputation as something of an innovation hub, says Sabrina Espasandin, Instructional Designer and Google Trainer at the school. “It’s smaller than the main campus in Switzerland so there’s more scope for experimenting with new technologies,” she says. GBS wanted to do more than just upgrade its email. The objective was to build an entire online platform enabling students, faculty, and staff to not only communicate with each other, but also to use it as a productivity platform for documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and more.
Connecting students and professors with Google Classroom
After evaluating its options, the Barcelona campus chose to implement Google Workspace for Education in early 2016, largely because of the widespread adoption of Google tools by students in their personal lives. “Most of our students were very familiar with Google tools and how Google works,” says Carlos. “It made the transition much easier for them.” With such a radical change, GBS also made sure to provide adequate training for everybody to help them overcome any issues that might arise during the transition. “There was a little pushback from people who had been using the same tools for a long time,” says Sabrina. “But once they saw for themselves the benefits of the new system, we turned sceptics into believers.”
The core of the new system was Google Classroom, a single, online destination where teachers and students could quickly and easily interact with each other no matter where they were. Gmail replaced the traditional email system, easing the load on the campus servers. Live editing in Docs, Sheets, and Slides meant that students could work on projects and presentations at the same time without having to email multiple versions, which could get buried in long threads.
“It’s changed the whole way we work. Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.” –
Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School
The faculty used Sites as an opportunity to update their course materials from static slideshows that had to be downloaded for offline viewing, into animated, interactive pages online. Meanwhile, Forms proved itself useful as a way for professors to setup quizzes online and, in conjunction with Google Classroom, to help automate the marking process and quickly analyze results.
A new platform, a new way of working
The online hub that GBS built in Barcelona with Google Classroom and Google Workspace was very quickly seen as a success. So much so, that within six months, the school rolled out Google Workspace to all of its other campuses. As of Q3 2018, GBS has activated more than 2,300 user accounts. The students benefit from instant communication, frictionless collaboration, and the ability to work on projects outside the classroom. It also means they are in a better position to answer each other’s questions without having to wait for a response from their teacher.
Meanwhile, GBS’ teachers no longer have to deal with an extranet that required them to upload all their own content in an overly complicated way or spend hours bulk-creating new email addresses at the start of each year. “The time saved in administrative tasks has been massive,” says Sabrina. “User creation is a breeze compared to the past.” In addition, the faculty found a new efficiency with rote tasks, such as grading analysis, which allowed them to spend more time focusing on students and assessing their specific needs.
“In just a few clicks you can get a really good picture of the whole class,” says Sabrina. “Whenever we tried this before Google Classroom, we would enter the grades manually and it took forever.”
“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates. With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.” –
Carlos Moreno Gonzalez, Barcelona Campus Director, Geneva Business School
Meanwhile, Professors have found that, despite fears of an always-online culture, the collaborative nature of the new platform empowers students to help each other instead of just relying on help from the faculty.
“It’s changed the whole way we work,” says Carlos. “Students would post questions online, and other students would answer them before the teacher got there. It means the knowledge comes from the class, not just from the professor.”
With all of GBS migrated to Google Workspace, the search is on for the next leap forward. The school is currently working hard to provide some of its courses entirely online, for students who wish to work remotely but still benefit from GBS’ superior teaching and strong reputation. The content for the new modules will be hosted on Sites, while Google Classroom will serve as a central hub for teacher-student communication. GBS is working to personalize the modules for teachers and students alike. For example, every teacher will have access to a classroom roster that provides quick links to students’ digital portfolios, also hosted on a Google Site.
Building on the knowledge it has acquired in the last two years with various Google tools, the school is trying to make online learning more effective, as well as develop more in-depth measurements of student growth and progression. As it becomes more comfortable with Google Workspace and Google Classroom, GBS can look forward to exploring its new metrics with tools such as Google Data Studio.
“We’ve built a very personalized online platform designed to engage students and reduce dropout rates,” says Carlos. “With Google, we hope to bring the collaborative spirit we have in our normal classes to our online classrooms.”
The Secret Behind How ATB Reduced Strategic Planning Time by 50 Percent
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ATB Financial (ATB) operates in a highly competitive financial services space, with competitors ranging from big banks to financial technology startups, ready to grab a slice of the provincial market share. To retain its competitive advantage in an industry primed for disruption, ATB took an active role in its evolution by intentionally transforming the way banking products and services could be delivered. Through this bold transformation, paired with customer-obsession, ATB is primed to make good on its commitment to deliver happiness to its customers by being more than a bank.
To address its goals, ATB launched a new initiative called “Work Reimagined” powered by G Suite, with the aim of helping employees save time, make decisions faster, and spend more time with customers to drive happiness. However, to succeed, ATB needed to equip its distributed, mobile workforce with modern productivity tools that would simplify employee communication and collaboration.
Remote employees often experienced connectivity and performance challenges with the corporate VPN, limiting their productivity. At the same time, legacy office tools did not foster innovation and often slowed business processes, delaying the company’s ability to deliver new services and respond to customer needs.
“We wanted productivity tools that would allow us to make time richer for team members in support of our customers and achieve 10x improvements rather than small gains. We chose G Suite because it enables employees to think and work differently,” says Lorne Rubis, Chief Evangelist, ATB Financial.
You Won’t Believe the Number of Benefits These 3 Companies Achieved Just By Moving to G Suite
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Businesses of all sizes use G Suite to breakdown information barriers and increase employee collaboration. It’s been especially helpful for start-ups and for those who run their own businesses, where juggling multiple jobs—from operations to administration to accounting—is second nature.
For many of these businesses, G Suite helps them collaborate securely and free up time so that they can focus on what really matters: their customers. Below are how three businesses use G Suite to both scale and mobilize while keeping their customers top of mind.
MobileOne Keeps its Employees Mobile
Workers spend up to 8 hours per week searching for, or consolidating, information. When you sift through emails to find files or dig through folders to attach documents, that time adds up.
MobileOne experienced this firsthand.
The company, which operates more than 125 T-Mobile premium retail stores in the US, found that its employees were sinking unnecessary time in email going back-and-forth searching for files.
Its previous productivity tools made it difficult to collaborate, especially for remote employees, and tough to share the latest information, like growth and performance metrics, at an accelerated pace. With this in mind, MobileOne moved to G Suite.
Revel Stark, MobileOne’s Director of Recruiting and Marketing, was heading to the beach with his family one Sunday when his colleague sent an urgent request for a document from him. It took just seconds to access the requested document in the Google Drive mobile app and share it, rather than having to search through files on a laptop, or wait until Monday when he was back in the office.
In addition, real-time editing in Docs and Sheets allows MobileOne employees to streamline how they share and edit documents since it eliminates version control. The company now creates central repositories of information in Docs and Sheets, ensuring everyone is working with the most up-to-date information, saved securely in the cloud.
JBGoodwin Realtors Streamlines Business Processes to Create New Home Owners
As a real-estate company with multiple offices in Texas and clients across the country, JBGoodwin Realtors needed a secure productivity solution that powered real-time employee collaboration.
But it also looked to a solution to help reduce costly maintenance, archive information securely in the cloud, and open up opportunities to streamline business processes. The company turned to G Suite to help.
By moving to G Suite, JBGoodwin Realtors adopted a cloud-first strategy that improved its data security by catching phishing attempts before they reached employees, and as a result, helped reduce time spent on platform maintenance by 30 percent.
Because Gmail allows users to easily archive emails in the cloud, the company no longer needs to invest in hard drive space to save messages. Its employees can easily access emails securely on any device both online or offline. Plus, the company can rest assured that their information stays secure with the help of built-in phishing protections.
Finally, via resources in the G Suite Marketplace, JBGoodwin Realtors automated its manual processes by connecting G Suite data with its CRM and marketing tools, so that its realtors can focus on making valuable connections with potential clients instead of inputting data in multiple systems.
TrueCar Drove a Smooth Transition to G Suite
More than 1.5 billion people use Gmail everyday. Since employees are often already comfortable with using Gmail in their personal lives, transitioning to using it at work is a smooth process.
This was crucial for TrueCar, an automotive resale marketplace that connects sellers with potential buyers (and arms them with pricing information). Minimal onboarding support and training was needed when implementing G Suite.
The team took advantage of G Suite’s User Interface customizations, which can be tailored to a user’s preference in Settings. For example, at TrueCar, admins customized their Calendar interface to be a side-by-side calendar view so they could easily see multiple schedules on a single screen.
With G Suite, there are many ways to customize your apps to help you stay productive.
Google Cloud Partnership Helps Lowe’s SRE Team Achieve 20X More Releases Per Month
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Editor’s note: Today we hear from the Lowe’s SRE team. They share about how they have been able to increase the number of releases they can support by adopting Google’s Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) framework and leveraging their partnership with Google Cloud.
At Lowe’s, we’ve made significant progress in our multiyear technology transformation. To modernize our systems and build new capabilities for our customers and associates, we leverage Google’s SRE framework and Google Cloud, which helps us meet their needs faster and more effectively. With these efforts, we’ve been able to go from one release every two weeks to 20+ releases daily—about 20X more releases per month.
Our SRE transformation didn’t happen overnight, though. Every step along the way brought some challenges. But looking back, we are excited to see how much we have accomplished for our customers as a result.
Back in 2018, before adopting SRE practices, we were more reactive than proactive, following an “eyes on glass” approach. On-call structures and incident management efficiency were not at optimal levels with too many repetitive and manual tasks, resulting in operational toil. Production concerns were not surfaced into the product roadmap, which resulted in delays in making fixes.
Bootstrapping SRE at Lowe’s
As we moved from on-prem to Google Cloud, we decided to move from a monolithic- to microservices-based architecture. And to better manage this new architecture, we embarked on an SRE journey.
Then as COVID-19 hit, we really had to accelerate this journey as customers increasingly moved to online ordering and delivery to meet their Total Home Improvement needs. To do so, we followed four key principles that allowed us to meet changing customer needs quickly and release fast and reliably.
- Automate away toil
As we moved from traditional Ops to an SRE ecosystem, our biggest opportunity was reducing toil, so that engineers can spend time on activities that drive business impact and customer outcomes. We think of toil as work that is manual, repetitive, tactical, devoid of enduring value—but automatable. So, to tackle toil, we focused on automating away the need for manual intervention. As an example, we made sure engineers were not the first point of contact for any alert. Any triage or resolution that an engineer can perform, a machine can be trained to do the same. We used supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to automate our toil. With a long-term goal of “no toil,” our SREs work on identifying and reducing toil to a manageable level across the organization. - Engineer alignment through roadmaps
Our goal is to maximize the engineering velocity of developer teams while keeping products reliable. We want an engagement model where product, SRE and development teams are closely aligned. A key way we’ve been able to create this alignment is by having our SREs embedded into domain and product teams. Each domain has an SRE, who is involved at the beginning stages of product development to ensure that the domain stakeholders are in alignment with the SRE initiatives. As such, SREs are able to improve the reliability, performance, scalability and launch velocity of the services throughout all phases of the service lifecycle. - Adopt one-touch releases
Our path to production used to contain many manual steps and validations, slowing the rate at which we released features. Additionally, we used to bulk all our releases together to deploy at once, which increased the risk of failure and created a longer feedback loop from production. To tackle this with an SRE mindset, we created a one-touch release process in which SREs review the product team’s pull requests. When approved, this triggers a DevSecOps pipeline that deploys the approved changes to production securely. This process created a safe, reliable and sustainable continuous delivery pipeline with quick feedback loops. Striking the right balance between speed, innovation and stability, we were able to increase our releases exponentially for the year, taking less than 30 minutes per release to deliver quality code, including various automated quality checks and processes, all in just one click. - Embrace capacity planning
To ensure our services have enough spare capacity to handle any surge in traffic patterns, our SREs emphasize capacity planning, making recommended capacity changes in the continuous delivery (CD) pipeline. They constantly monitor performance to make sure the service is robust, stable and available. And when there’s a sudden surge beyond the forecasted volume, SREs change the capacity on demand and document changes for the performance and domain teams.
Capacity planning is especially important for us during peak holiday times such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday (BFCM). We lay out our SRE stability plan three months in advance and surface into the domain team’s product roadmap. This way development teams are able to allocate sufficient engineering time to reliability. We do performance testing to ensure the environment is able to sustain increased load over long periods of time and also handle sudden surges in traffic. We also do region failover testing at a global scale to validate the automatic failover duration of service level agreements (SLAs), SRE and domain readiness. Additionally, we conduct Black Friday and Cyber Monday-specific destructive testing to validate customer experience, reliability and more.
Google Cloud’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday white-glove service played a key role in ensuring our success in both BFCM 2019 and BFCM 2020. This service included on-site visits from Google’s Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team who reviewed Lowe’s web architecture, capacity planning, operations practices for event risks, and presented workshops on topics such as incident response best practices.
Looking ahead
There is always room for improvement, and at Lowe’s we aim to continuously improve our SRE practices. One thing that has worked well for us, which we plan to continue, has been our road shows, where senior SRE leads present to other SREs and application domain teams on the latest SRE principles and best practices, and to get input in real-time from them.
Google’s tools and methodology have played an instrumental role in helping reshape our SRE practices and better serve our customers. We look forward to building on the momentum and partnership as we continue our SRE journey at Lowe’s.
If you want to learn more about how to adopt SRE best practices on Google Cloud, check out our documentation. If you want to learn more about Google SRE, visit our website. Stay tuned for the next blogs with Lowe’s discussing how they trained their engineering talent to adopt SRE practices and tooling, and how they improved MTTR using SRE principles.
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How L&T Financial Services Processes 95% of Motorcycle Loans in Less Than Two Minutes
L&T Financial Services is one of the largest lenders in India. India’s demonetization policy in recent years has led to a shift from cash transactions to digital payments. In 2016, the government withdrew 500 and 1000 rupee notes from circulation and encouraged a heavily cash-based population to deposit their canceled notes in banks. Financial institutions needed to pivot to a new way of doing business to stay competitive. L&T Financial Services modernized its IT infrastructure to keep up with changes and capture digital opportunities.
“Working capital is crucial to stimulate growth in rural communities. Our role as a lender is to provide access to funds. We don’t want to burden borrowers with the complexities of getting a loan. Towards this end, digitization is an important step,” says Dinanath Dubhashi, Managing Director and CEO at L&T Financial Services. “Google Cloud helps us streamline service delivery and identify the right customers. By offering the fastest processing time in the industry, we want to be the go-to lender for all customers.”
L&T Financial Services considered multiple cloud providers before choosing Google Cloud. According to Dinanath, Google Cloud understands both the need for businesses to move fast and the need for IT to modernize at different speeds. “We weren’t forced to abandon existing IT systems and migrate lock, stock, and barrel to Google Cloud on day one.”
L&T Financial Services engaged Google Cloud Professional Services to guide its digital transformation journey. The smooth migration from proof of concept to full-scale deployment on Google Cloud took a matter of months.
“Collaboration: a small idea with big opportunities. G Suite helps us connect remote branches with the head office, easily access shared files to submit and track approvals, and conduct face-to-face discussions to accelerate approval processes.”
—Dinanath Dubhashi, MD and CEO, L&T Financial Services
Digitizing the workforce with G Suite
The move to the cloud at L&T Financial Services started in 2017 when the company introduced G Suite to its 14,500 employees. The legacy email system was cumbersome to use, especially for frontline staff who need email access while they are on the road. Using Gmail, employees can connect with customers and co-workers from anywhere, on any device. Employees save time by scheduling meetings with Calendar, collaborating on Docs, and conducting video calls using Hangouts Meet.
Converting data into credit insights using BigQuery
Taking data intelligence one step further, L&T Financial Services adopts a responsible lending approach by applying algorithm-based data analytics to improve credit standards. Beyond traditional data such as credit score and credit payment history, the company also considers macro-economic indicators for risk audits. For example, a farmer’s ability to pay off the loan of his new tractor depends on a successful planting and harvest. So L&T Financial Services feeds long-term data into BigQuery and runs queries to predict loan defaults based on rainfall and crop yield.
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What IT Managers Really Need to Know About G Suite and Google Cloud Platform
Today, some of the world’s largest organizations are using Google technology to innovate. They are leveraging Google APIs and platform services to find new ways to transform their organizations.
They are also leveraging Google Cloud to empower their G Suite users. But what does the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) really offer?
For starters, GCP brings to the table some of the same capabilities as the G Suite like building globally distributed storage systems and collaboration. GCP has a deep and broad portfolio from moving entire datacenters or providing access to Google APIs so you can build those into your applications and services.
You can also make use of business platforms like Apigee or Orbitera or leverage Google APIs to integrate with your applications. Most organizations today are want don’t want to move any of their infrastructure. And GCP helps organizations achieve exactly that.
Vincent Wienczorkowski, Cloud Sales Manager, Google Cloud, and Nick Pan, Cloud Customer Engineer, Google Cloud, share how IT managers, like you, can help their organizations make the most of Google Cloud Platform.
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