Scenario
City West Water is one of three metropolitan water businesses owned by the Victorian Government, providing drinking water, sewerage, trade waste and recycled water services to customers in Melbourne’s central business district, inner and western suburbs. With customer value at the heart of the business, City West Water strives to be an exceptional service provider that puts customers first and benefits the community.
In achieving their organisational goals, City West Water place importance on their foundations of dynamic technology and great partnerships. When they embarked upon an important digital transformation, these needed to be at its core. In line with the organisation’s commitment to enabling their people to respond to customers in a changing world, the City West Water team recognised a need to undertake an initiative to modernise and essentially ‘rethink’ their ways of working.
As a result, the Modern Workplace program was born, introducing upgrades and new technologies into their business – spanning across Office 365 (Exchange, OneDrive and SharePoint), Windows 10, enhanced security features (Intune and Azure AD), new collaboration capabilities (Teams, Surface Hubs), as well as early explorations in innovative intelligence features such as their Teams Knowledge Bot, named by the team as ‘AquaBot’.
Solution
In selecting a partner to assist in helping to bring the program to fruition, trust and confidence were key factors in the decision to engage Arinco, as a truly embedded partner rather than just a ‘service provider’. Arinco worked collaboratively with City West Water to bring them on a journey, beginning with an assessment, a foundation built on a strategic roadmap, and a carefully curated program of works that included architecting, designing, implementing and migrating their entire end user platform from traditional on-premises to a modern hybrid-cloud Microsoft 365 platform.
With the transformation representing a significant shift in the way people are working, a critical factor in the collaborative success was around managing the change in bringing City West Water’s people on the journey and effectively strengthening the link between people and technology. With the event of Covid-19 at the height of this work taking place, there was naturally a heightened emphasis on adoption and security considerations.
"The work was done quickly, but conducted securely, which was of utmost importance to us, particularly at the time"
Outcome
Starting with what was already a robust cultural foundation, the organisation has already seen evidence of the efficiencies that have come through Arinco’s work. While the technically expertise that Arinco brought to CWW throughout the project, the true value lies in the user’s perception on these technologies becoming more accessible and usable. This is why providing visibility of the rate of adoption in the M365 suite is a critical aspect of any Arinco engagement as a key factor in attributing ‘success’. With CWW we’re proud to report on the following great metrics:
When measured against active employees, active usage of Office 365 ProPlus, OneDrive, SharePoint, Exchange Online, Teams was close to 100% Over 50% of the users started using their productivity tools on their mobile devices Post migration surveys results were overall very positive, with a 4.23 and 4.42 average rating on questions directly around their ability to operate ‘BAU’ as part of transition to Win10/M365 and the overall Modern Workplace migration activities.
The success of the engagement so far has been a testament to the shared values and trusted partner approach and Arinco looks forward to further solidifying this to help realise the overall vision for the organisation.
