The ATB Financial Chief Transformation Officer, Wellington Holbrook and the leadership team had a big question: “How can we transform banking if we don’t transform the way we work?” The Edmonton, Alberta-based bank knew it was time for a change.
It achieved this by embracing cloud collaboration. ATB wanted to harness the collective power of its entire workforce, no matter where they were in the province, in order to foster a strong hive mindset through collaboration. A locked-down, inflexible digital work environment was not the right path for this journey, as other businesses learned after they deployed Google Workspace.
Eliminating Legacy Software & Choosing Google Workspace
Changing direction meant replacing on-premise legacy software and eliminating poor connectivity and communication across the workforce. By doing so, ATB recently became the first bank to “Go Google” globally in an effort to work smarter, better — and in a more customer-centric manner.
The company dubbed this effort, “Work Reimagined,” playing upon the fact that a move to the Google Workspace platform would elevate the bank’s workforce’s productivity, collaboration and efficiency to the next level to make banking “work for people.” And it would allow them to do this by building a cloud collaboration hive in a secure cloud environment.
The organization made this a reality as Onix delivered a quick and successful Google Workspace deployment, bringing its A+ game to this project.
Historic Google Workspace Deployment in Financial Sector
With this deployment, Onix became the first Google partner ever to elevate a financial institution to Google Workspace. The lightning-fast migration of 7,500 users across 300 locations in the province of Alberta spanned just four months, with planning occurring in the two months before the project began.
Deployment included migrating ATB’s entire history — 35 terabytes of data, including 340 million email messages, calendar items and contacts — to Google Workspace. Onix delivered a seamless deployment, with no disruption of work.
After the physical deployment, Onix served as the foundational structure, bolstering the effort by guiding the company to get where it needed to be and when it needed to be there during an organization-wide adoption of workplace cloud collaboration.
Deployment Success Rests on Change Management
For this effort, Onix change management experts worked side-by-side with ATB leadership — known as the G Team — to plan and brainstorm how to make this crucial adoption a success organization-wide, offering advice and insights from an internal communications standpoint and through training and sponsorship. The executives involved all quickly embraced Google Workspace tools.
The Onix team also used a targeted change management strategy to help ATB create special workforce training and engagement programs to bring all workers up to speed about the implementation and adoption effort. The first initiative, Google Workspace on Wheels, trained workers at multiple branches, in both remote rural areas and the city.
The second effort, a multi-level sponsorship reached from the C-Level to Google Champions, known as G-Evangelists. This group received training to serve as the ATB innovation council to help with the adoption. These G-Evangelists received in-depth “train the trainer” sessions to prepare them for this transformation. Onix also offered lunch and learn sessions, as well as open “ask the expert” sessions for the entire company.
As part of the transformation, Onix connected ATB with other key Onix clients using Google Workspace (including EnPro and Whirlpool) so that ATB leadership could hear other transformation stories and envision what they wanted their experience to be based upon the success of others — and around best practices.
Post-deployment, Onix continues to assist with the adoption and successive initiatives through our Customer Success Services programs, keeping ATB moving along its cloud transformation journey and into being more than “just a bank.”
