Introduction

The Google Cloud Professional Services Organization’s (PSO) mission is to help our customers get the most out of Google products. PSO is responsible for customer success by sharing our technical expertise in order to unlock business value from the cloud by providing cloud strategy and best practice advice, implementation guidance, and training using our proven methodology. 

In this blog post, we want to focus specifically on Operational Health Reviews and how PSO engages in a myriad of activities to ensure the overall success and health of a customer engagement while ensuring we are meeting customer expectations and objectives, managing risk, and ultimately delivering value during or after the Google Cloud migration. We will discuss the assets, methodology, and tools that we leverage to ensure this success.

What is an Operational Health Review and what purpose does it serve?

Operational Health Reviews (OHR) are regular reviews to proactively address the below topics: 

• A customer’s support experience
• Analysis of trends in key operational metrics
• Analysis of trends in Google Cloud usage
• Status reports for high-priority cloud projects
• Discussion of upcoming events
• Discussion of potential opportunities for training
• Review of feature requests

The core aim of an OHR is to measure progress and advise customers on the overall health of the account and migration progress while providing recommendations as a team on what adjustments should be considered to ensure continued success. During the OHR, we will address any pain points as well as identify and remediate any negative trends in support interfaces and usage metrics. 

The intention of the activity is to also perform a blameless reflection for continuous improvement. This supports the effort to maintain common ground and obtain mutual optimism for the next phase of the customer’s journey on Google Cloud. 

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of the activities that go into an OHR. 

Support experience

One of the Google Cloud’s Support Organization’s goals is to simplify and streamline our customer’s support experience with a scalable and flexible set of offerings built with the customer needs at the center. This includes supporting an ongoing partnership model, with a proactive and collaborative approach. Premium Support is our top-tier support model which is a paid support offering designed for enterprises that run mission critical workloads and require fast response times, platform stability, and increased operational efficiencies. As part of this offering, customers are provided with a Technical Account Manager (TAM) who is in charge of delivering frequent touchpoints, including OHRs. 

During the support experience section of an OHR, some of the following topics may be reviewed:

• Case volume by priority
• Case volume by product
• Cases linked to Google Cloud incidents
• Escalated cases or incidents
• Case initial response time (IRT)
• Case IRT SLO Met Rate
• Case total resolution time (TRT) hours

The purpose of this activity is to better understand the efficiency of both the customer’s and Google’s cloud operations from a support trend perspective. The goal is to celebrate any positive trends, but also to identify potential negative trends and proactively determine a remediation strategy. 

Status reports for high-priority cloud projects

The purpose of this part of the OHR is to ensure the senior management stakeholders have continued visibility into the status of all their high-priority cloud initiatives with an easy-to-read, sometimes color-coded assessment on the status of each project. The assessment [Figure 1] may include, but is not limited to potential identified risks, key next steps, key stakeholders, and a mitigation plan for any high priority issues that may occur during their migration engagement. Additionally, the TAM may also cover any upcoming milestones or events, as well as any potential anticipated future blockers [Figure 2]. 

Review trends in Google Cloud usage

This part of the OHR is meant to provide the customer with a holistic view of their overall Google Cloud usage. The purpose is to provide understanding around what products are being used on Google Cloud and also where cost is generally being allocated for overall cost management and budget tracking purposes. This can help customers with their overall cost optimization efforts. Some of the metrics we may cover in this section are:

• Current Google Cloud usage by service
• Google Cloud growth trends
• Google Cloud growth trends by service
• Google Cloud growth trends by project
• Review of used and available service credits

Feature request review and advocacy

TAMs will work with customers to help identify product needs and advocate for feature requests with Google Product Management and Engineering teams. While feature request advocacy is an ongoing activity, during the OHR, the TAM will review any high priority feature requests that have previously been submitted, providing updates on status including potential release dates. 

When a feature is coming up for the release, the TAM can help the customer prepare for implementation (providing early Preview access, coordinating a meeting with the Product Manager to review the feature, etc.) and then continue to provide support until the feature is successfully implemented in the customer environment. Similarly, if a high priority or technical blocking feature is not yet coming available, the TAM can help offer an alternative solution that can unblock the customer in the short term. 

The OHR is also a great time for the TAM to work with the customer to ensure they have early access to new and exciting features that are in Alpha or Beta, and that would be beneficial to the customer and their environment. 

Training strategy

Training is a primary component to ensuring the overall success in adopting Google Cloud. During the OHR, a review of training metrics will be provided. This may include tracking metrics to determine how the customer is tracking towards an initially agreed upon learning plan or coming up with additional upskilling strategies as necessary. Additionally, throughout an engagement, the customer’s TAM will provide opportunities for both free and paid Google Cloud training. 

Conclusion 

PSO is the voice of customer health, maintaining priority to proactively and strategically guide large enterprise customers to operate effectively and efficiently in the cloud, both during and after the migration process. The OHR is an efficient and effective way to maintain alignment, ensure expectations and objectives are being met, manage risk, and overall ensure the success of the customer.

Learn more about our methodology and get started with Google Cloud by completing a free discovery and assessment of your migration. Alternatively, if you’d like to engage directly with our PSO team on your migration, contact us!

At Google Cloud, being a strategic partner is part of our DNA. Whether it’s listening closely to our customers, helping to build team skills for innovation or simply being there (since we know the cloud is 24/7), we get excited about working hands-on with customers to deliver new solutions. 

As we look to solve decades-old challenges with new technologies in workforce productivity, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence/machine learning, we know that we are only as good as the people behind the technology. Today, we’re proud to spotlight a few of the inspiring folks behind Google Cloud Public Sector and celebrate their recognition in the industry. 

Melissa Adamson, Head of Government Channels at Google Cloud, has been named to the highly respected Women of the Channel list for 2021. This annual list recognizes the unique strengths, leadership and achievements of female leaders in the IT channel. The women honored this year pushed forward with comprehensive business plans, marketing initiatives and innovative ideas to support their partners and customers.

Melissa was brought on to build the Public Sector channel from scratch. The initial focus was building the channel for the US government team and has since expanded to include education, Canada and Latin America.

Having a career background at both Microsoft and Accenture, Melissa leveraged her extensive professional network to build the organic partnerships needed to accelerate the Public Sector partner ecosystem. This helped her drive two key wins (US Postal Service and PTO) and personally recruit top cloud partners in the industry. Melissa loves card games and is learning a new language.

Todd Schoeder, Director of Global Public Sector Digital Strategy, was recently featured in the “Top 20 Cloud Executives to Watch in 2021” by Wash Exec. Recognized for his work in helping customers navigate through the impact of COVID-19 and developing innovative solutions to meet mission challenges, he says: “New partnerships are required to solve for the problems of the future. Challenges that were previously thought of as insurmountable, too risky or expensive, are actually quite the opposite — as long as you have the right partner that is working in your best interest with you.”

Josh Marcuse, Head of Strategy & Innovation, received his second Wash100 Award for leading a digital transformation team that works to drive the development of public sector solutions, including cyber defense, smart cities, and public health.

Josh has launched services to support collaborative team operations including Workspace for Government and an artificial intelligence-based customer service platform to support remote work needs. His work also includes leading Google Cloud’s partnerships with organizations to improve data sharing in the public health community, contact tracing activities, and supporting research efforts across national laboratories. 

Like Melissa, Josh was brought on to build a new team dedicated to strategy and innovation. This team’s purpose is to bring an intense focus to public sector mission outcomes and the public servants who own them. Josh spent a decade pushing digital modernization and workforce transformation at the U.S. Department of Defense, and co-founded the Federal Innovation Council at the Partnership for Public Service, and now brings that domain expertise to supporting government workers who are driving digital transformation.

Join us in celebrating these folks for their leadership and contributions!

Digital technology offers increasing flexibility and choice to consumers. As a result, the retail industry is dramatically shifting toward more tailored and personalized experiences for shoppers, and businesses are rethinking how they deliver value to customers.

This couldn’t be more true for the beauty retailing industry where leading companies are turning to digital technology to create customized shopping experiences.

At Google Cloud, we’re particularly excited about our work with Ulta Beauty, the largest beauty retailer in the United States with more than 1196 stores in all 50 states, and how the company is using Google Cloud technology solutions to power personalization and redefine beauty retailing.

Established in 1990, Ulta Beauty has had incredible success as a company, and as customers become more discerning and curious about their purchases, the company is finding new ways to meet their changing needs.

Recently, leaders at Ulta Beauty recognized a huge opportunity to complement and enhance the shopping experience by helping beauty enthusiasts navigate through more than 500 brands and 25,000 products carried in their stores and online channel.

They decided to leverage the data from Ulta Beauty’s successful Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to create and offer more unique and personalized user experiences.

With more than 30 million members generating data through sales, transactions, product reviews, and social media engagement, Ulta Beauty’s Loyalty Program creates a comprehensive data set, and the company sought the right technology partner to help organize, analyze and transform that data into valuable insights for its customers.

Ulta Beauty’s leaders knew they had an opportunity to leverage data analytics and machine learning to reach customers in new ways, enhance the guest experience, and continue to grow their active loyalty member base. After considering a number of cloud providers, they chose to expand their existing partnership with Google Cloud.

“Google Cloud listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team to address our challenges,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “The ease of working with the Google Cloud team and their breadth of experience made the decision a no-brainer, laying the foundation for a great partnership.”  

In 2019, Ulta Beauty announced it was working with Google Cloud Platform to unify and organize its data, using:

• BigQuery to perform data analysis and generate dynamic content, personalized product recommendations, and event-based messages for customers.
• Cloud Storage to provide highly available, secure, resilient and cost-effective access to data across the entire enterprise.
• Compute Engine for the high-performance scalability needed to grow with customer demand while painlessly migrating existing applications to the cloud.
• Anthos to build a hybrid cloud foundation that allows their applications to take advantage of all this data, combining the power and flexibility of GKE with the ability to leverage their existing investment in secure infrastructure on-premises.

Our partnership with Ulta Beauty has enabled increased engagement with customers in store and online, and the creation of new tools and capabilities, including a new Virtual Beauty Advisor tool to deliver tailored recommendations and help shoppers choose the right products, and a Customer Conversation Platform that’s enabling deeper connections with guests, ultimately driving customer loyalty.

“It’s been a really efficient process so far due in part to the ease of working with the Google team,” said Michelle Pacynski, vice president of digital innovation at Ulta Beauty. “They’re experienced, approachable, and their can-do style makes for a great partnership. They listened to our needs and worked in tandem with our engineering team, figuring things out, and getting it done.”

In our conversations with technology leaders about data-driven transformation using Google Data Cloud –  industry’s leading unified data and AI solution – , one important topic is incorporating continuous intelligence to move from answering questions such as “What has happened? to questions like “What is happening?” and “What might happen?”. The core to this evolution is the need for an underlying data processing that not only provides powerful real-time capabilities for events happening close to origination, but also brings together existing data sources under one unified data platform to enable organizations to draw insights and take actions holistically. Dataflow, Google’s cloud-native data processing and streaming analytics platform, is a key component of any modern data and AI architecture and data transformation journey, along with BigQuery, Google’s internet-scale warehouse with built-in streaming, BI engine and ML; Pub/Sub, a global no-ops event delivery service; and Looker, a modern BI and embedded analytics platform. One of the key evaluation factors is potential economic value of Dataflow to their organization, particularly in the context of engaging other stakeholders is key for many of the leaders that we engage with. So we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a comprehensive study on the impact that Dataflow had on their organization by interviewing actual customers . 

Today we’re excited to share our commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, the Total Economic Impact™ of Google Cloud Dataflow, which allows data leaders to understand and quantify the benefits of Dataflow, and use cases it enables. Forrester conducted interviews with Dataflow customers to evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of investing in Dataflow across an organization. Based on their interviews, Forrester identified major financial benefits across four different areas: business growth, infrastructure cost savings, data engineer productivity, and administration efficiency. In fact, Forrester found that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a 55% boost in developer productivity and a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs. In fact, Forrester projects that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a range of up to 171% Return on Investment (ROI) and a less than six months payback period. Customers can now use figures in the report to compute their own Return on Investment (ROI) and payback period.

“Dataflow is integral to accelerating time-to-market, decreasing time-to-production, reducing time to figure out how to use data for use cases, focusing time on value-add tasks, streamlining ingestion, and reducing total cost of ownership.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Let’s take a deeper look at the ways that Forrester found that Dataflow can help you achieve your goals and unlock your business potential. 

Benefit #1: Increase data engineer productivity by 55%

Developers can choose among a variety of programming languages to define and execute data workflows. Dataflow also seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud Platform and open source technologies to maximize value and applicability to a wide variety of use cases. Dataflow streamlined workflows with code reusability,dynamic templates, and the simplicity of a managed service. Engineers trusted pipelines to run correctly and adhere to governance. Data engineers avoided laborious issue-monitoring and remediation tasks that were common in the legacy environments such as poor performance, lack of availability, and failed jobs. Teams valued the language flexibility and open source base.

“Dataflow provided us with ETL replacement that opened limitless potential use cases and enabled us to do smarter data enhancement while data remains in motion.” — Director of data projects, financial services

Benefit #2: Reduce infrastructure costs by up-to 50% for batch and streaming workloads 

Dataflow’s serverless autoscaling and discrete control of job needs, scheduling, and regions eliminated overhead and optimized technology spending. Consolidating global data processing solutions to Dataflow further eliminated excess costs while ensuring performance, resilience, and governance across environments. Dataflow’s unified streaming and batch data platform gives organizations the flexibility to define either workload in the same programming model, run it on the same infrastructure, and manage it from a single operational management tool. 

“Our costs with our cloud data platform using Dataflow are just a fraction of the costs we faced before. Now we only pay for cloud infrastructure consumption because the open source base helps us avoid licensing costs. We spend about $120,000 per year with Dataflow, but we’d be spending millions with our old technologies.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Benefit #3: Increase top-line revenue by improving customer experience and retention with payback time of < 6 months

Streaming analytics is an essential capability in today’s digital world to gain real-time actionable insights. Likewise, organizations must also have flexible, high- performance batch environments to analyze historical data for building machine learning models, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Dataflow enabled real-time streaming use cases, improved data enrichment, encouraged data exploration,improved performance and resiliency, reduced errors, increased trust, and eliminated barriers to scale. As a result, organizations provided customers with more accurate, relevant, and in-the-moment data-backed services and insights — boosting customer experience, creating new revenue streams, and improving acquisition, retention, and enrichment.

“It’s already been proven that we are getting more business [with Dataflow] because we can turn around results faster for customers.” – VP of technology, financial services technology

“When we provide data to our customers and partners with Dataflow, we are much more confident in those numbers and can provide accurate data within a minute. Our customers and partners have taken note and commented on this. It’s reduced complaints and prevented churn.” – Senior software engineer, media

Other benefits 

Eliminated administrative overhead and toil

As a cloud-native managed service, all administration tasks such as provisioning, scaling, and updates are automatically handled by Google Cloud. Teams no longer need to manage servers and related software for legacy data processing solutions. Admins also streamlined processes for setting up data sources, adding pipelines, and enforcing governance.

Saved business operations costs for support teams and data end users

Dataflow improved the speed, quality, reliability, and ease of access to data for insights for general business users, saving time and empowering users to drive better data-backed outcomes. It also reduced support inquiry volume while automating manual job creation.

What’s next?

Download the Forrester Total Economic Impact study today to dive deep into the economic impact Dataflow can deliver your organization. We would love to partner with you to explore the potential Dataflow can unlock in your teams. Please reach out to our sales team to start a conversation about your data transformation with Google Cloud.