City of Omaha and Douglas County join forces to move government workers to Google Apps

Posted by Derek Kruse, CIO, Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, Nebraska

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Derek Kruse, CIO of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm), which provides municipal technical services to the City of Omaha and Douglas County, Nebraska. Be sure to join Innovation for the Nation, a virtual summit featuring government customers, streaming live on July 31st and August 1st. And see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Derek Kruse, CIO

The City of Omaha and Douglas County have something many municipalities lack, a collaborative relationship. With Omaha located within Douglas County, we are fortunate to live in a community that values working together to solve complex challenges. Our cooperation has led to many innovative solutions, including the formation of the Douglas Omaha Technology Commission (DOTComm). Another example of this collaborative spirit is our decision to upgrade our email and calendaring platform. In order to improve government productivity and efficiency, DOTComm has been tasked with moving approximately 5,000 city and county employees in more than 70 departments to Google Apps for Government.

In May, after a thorough and exhaustive evaluation process, the DOT.Comm Oversight Committee approved the proposal to implement Google Apps for Government. The decision was endorsed by the Mayor and also unanimously approved by both the City Council and the County Board of Commissioners. We decided to go with Google Apps because it not only meets our current needs, but it offers new collaboration features at a fraction of the cost it would take to upgrade our existing system. We chose SADA Systems, a Google Apps Premier Enterprise Reseller, to help with this transition and serve as our deployment partner. It is obvious that SADA’s focus on training and ensuring a smooth migration will enable us to quickly and easily adopt Google Apps.

Moving to Google Apps will provide tremendous benefits. Our current system is more than 10 years old and lacks any modern features. Employees struggle to access information on their mobile devices and people spend valuable time deleting emails because our mailboxes do not have enough space. Given the age of our system, we have seen a steep increase in outages as well. That will all change when we move to Google Apps for Government. We will offer a more secure, stable, modern and scalable cloud solution to the City and County. Employees will now be able to communicate instantly and work collaboratively online, even if they are miles apart. Mailbox size alone has people cheering -- one of our employees made the comparison that we will be moving from a shot glass to a swimming pool!

We started out this process to fix our aged email system. We have discovered this is much more than a fix -- this is the future -- and another big step in the ongoing collaboration between Omaha and Douglas County. The next few months will be very exciting as we implement Google Apps and we are very thrilled to be rolling up our sleeves once again to improve our community together.

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Unemployment Insurance Fraud Detection in Iowa

Posted by Gary Bateman, CIO, Iowa Workforce Development

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Gary Bateman, CIO for the Iowa Workforce Development. Be sure to join Innovation for the Nation, a virtual summit featuring government customers, streaming live on July 31st and August 1st. And see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

In Iowa, our mission at Iowa Workforce Development (IWD) is to provide a comprehensive statewide system of employment services, education and regulations to ensure the economic security of Iowa’s workers, businesses and communities. An important part of our effort is to identify and prevent unemployment insurance fraud. Our efforts have cut the rate of fraud to less than 6%, but we are not satisfied to stop there.

Detecting and preventing unemployment insurance fraud is challenging because of the high volume of claims we receive. Often times, we’re not able to detect the discrepancy until after multiple payments have been made. This lag means the bad actors can take the money and move on, making it difficult and expensive to recover the payment. We went looking for technologies to provide an even better rate of fraud detection, allowing us to act faster to prevent this criminal activity and save the state money.

After a competitive bid process, we selected Fraud Detection as a Service (FDaaS) by Pondera Solutions, a Google Enterprise Partner, to help us identify and prevent improper payments. FDaaS is a Google-powered solution that uses Google Prediction API, Google Maps, Google Street View and Google Earth.

With FDaaS, suspicious claims are proactively flagged by the system, which alerts IWD employees about potentially fraudulent claims. The claims are plotted on a heatmap built on Google Maps to identify areas with the highest fraud incidents and determine where to put more investigative resources. We also use Google Street View to check the validity of businesses that submit claims. All of these data points are compiled into a custom, configured dashboard that helps us quickly examine claimants and employers to validate whether these claims are valid. This dashboard will replace many of our manual processes of checking disparate databases. And because Google helps to integrate relevant market data into our validation processes, we can parse massive amounts of data quickly and efficiently, allowing us to identify advanced schemes and rapidly respond to potential issues. With all this information available at our fingertips, we can then examine claimants and employers to validate whether these claims are proper much more efficiently.

Using the new solution, IWD will improve accuracies in Unemployment Insurance, benefiting both the employers and citizens of Iowa. Our continuing efforts will help assure that the vast majority of unemployment insurance benefits are delivered to the citizens who need and deserve our assistance.

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Head for the Cloud: Nobel Biocare, manufacturer of dental implants, moves to Google Apps for Business

Posted by Dietmar Böhm, CIO at Nobel Biocare

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Dietmar Böhm, CIO of Nobel Biocare, a leader in innovative, restorative and aesthetic dental solutions, headquartered in Switzerland. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

Nobel Biocare was founded in 1981 in Göteborg, Sweden as Bofors Nobelpharma and we now have 2,500 employees in more than 40 countries. Our focus has always been on scientific innovation and developing safe and effective solutions to restore and improve our patient’s smiles. In order to provide the best dental care for our patients it’s important that our team is working together across all of our office locations.

In the healthcare industry, the privacy of our patients is extremely important. We wanted to give our employees the flexibility and mobility to work together while determining the best options for their patients, while still maintaining our data security and reducing our IT costs. As a company we had been using Lotus Notes, but I had personally been using Google Apps at work for over a year. I felt that by moving to the cloud, we would improve our ability to work together internally and with our suppliers, and offer our employees the most innovative technology available.

We believe that in order to attract the best talent and to retain the talent we have, it’s vital to provide the best technology that allows people to work together from anywhere. Today, many employees already know products such as Gmail, Google Drive or Google Calendar from using them in their personal lives. By using Google Apps for Business, we’re giving our employees the tools they’re used to and also building the foundation for years to come.

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CitiPower and Powercor drive innovation, enhance customer service with Google Earth Enterprise

Posted by Tony Matheson, Manager Distribution Network IT Program, Powercor Australia Ltd.

Editor's note: Our guest blogger this week is Tony Matheson, Manager Distribution Network IT Program for CitiPower and Powercor, electricity distributors whose core business is to deliver electricity to homes and businesses in Melbourne and throughout central and western Victoria. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.

As an electricity distributor, our primary job is managing assets such as poles, wires, and other equipment with a focus on safety, reliability, and cost effectiveness for 1.1 million customers, 80,000 kilometers of power lines, and more than half a million power poles. Every fault or outage must be managed, corrected and restored as quickly as possible, and risks to community power supplies caused by major events such as floods and bushfires must be avoided or mitigated swiftly.

With power distribution equipment spread across a wide area, we need to see the geographic locations of assets like poles, power transformers, switchgear, and so on, along with photos, maintenance, and planning information from our other enterprise systems. Yet we couldn’t overlay our data or put it into the context of an outage or other incident that might be happening in real time. The incumbent geographic information system requires specialised training to use and serves more specific functions. We needed something simple and effective to be able to overlay information from a variety of third-party sources including real-time emergency services information, as well as add further value and usefulness to data housed within our existing SAP Enterprise Asset Management software and Data Warehouse.

After considering several options, we chose Google Earth Enterprise because it would offer powerful 3D visualisation technology that would be intuitive to use for everyone in the company, without training. We used the Google Earth API to customize our own view of the virtual globe to meet our exact business requirements. Our virtual globe is now housed onsite on a server behind our company firewall.

Google Earth Enterprise allows us to create maps depending on the need, share them with others, and reach remote workers, so everyone has a consistent and familiar experience wherever they are. Google Earth Enterprise is so innovative and flexible that we can develop iteratively, with agility, and at a very low cost. We often can add a new layer to meet an immediate business need on the same day it is requested.

Today, we are delivering better, faster service to customers and driving business efficiencies. Situations can be analysed and acted upon with speed and accuracy. Google Earth Enterprise has helped us become far more innovative and agile. The investment required was low, and the benefits were immediate.

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Happy SysAdmin Day

Posted by Posted by Ben Fried, CIO, Google

System Administrators’ responsibilities can’t be captured in a simple job description. They vary from company to company and even within organizations, but one thing is constant: systems administrators are the people who do what it takes to keep companies running. After more than 25 years in IT, I’ve worked with an incredibly talented and dedicated group of systems administrators and on this SysAdmin Day, I want to thank you for all that you do.

Thank you for being the ones behind the scenes who make sure things “just work.” For coming in on holidays and in the middle of the night to do an upgrade or fix a server issue. For answering all of our questions, no matter how challenging or strange. For hours spent fixing the simplest email support issue to monitoring servers during a hurricane. I actually think that it’s what we don’t know about that deserves the most thanks. All too often, users don’t understand the amazing efforts that go into making things “just work”: physical plant, hardware, storage, networking, security, backup, disaster recovery, configuration, upgrades, patches... and it’s all only really successful if users only have to think about their own work.

What we do in IT has evolved over the years, (hey, that’s a big part of why we’re here, right?), but your role has only gotten more demanding. I’ve worked in technology since I was in high school; in my earliest days, the hardest problems might have been helping researchers convert their data from one tape format to another, which seemed equal parts engineering and magic. I remember another time, someone had a program that made a washing machine-sized disk drive vibrate across the machine room. It took us a while to figure that one out. And back then, before the Internet, a break-in meant the intruder was in one of our computing centers, and we’d have to send the most intimidating-looking system administrators to guard the door until the police came.

I know the role has changed, and the challenges many of you face are much more complicated than they used to be. We thought the best way to say thanks would be to hear directly from you. Earlier this week we asked you to share some of the most far-fetched requests you’ve received from colleagues. The stories shared made us laugh, and reminded us how much hard work you do. If we don’t say it enough, thank you again for everything you do.

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Global IT business gets up to speed with Google Search Appliance

Posted by Posted by Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Sharon Levin, Knowledge Base Manager at Radware, an international application delivery and security applications provider for virtual and cloud data centers, headquartered in Israel. The company has 10,000 customers across the world. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At Radware, we help over 10,000 companies around the world assess and manage everything from Business Intelligence to Customer Relationship Management to Enterprise Resource Planning. Our customers use our tools as a core part of their strategy for adapting to market challenges, maintaining business continuity and keeping costs down. But navigating these complex products requires our help and support. So we offer a database of over 2,000 Q&As, known as Knowledge Base, to assist in solving different problems, along with telephone and online support.

Until recently, it was a slow process for customers to find what they were looking for in this vast pool of data. If they didn’t type the exact phrase that was listed in the Knowledge Base database, the necessary results would not always appear. We also struggled internally to navigate the search options. Even in my role as Knowledge Base Manager, I sometimes found it quicker to use Google’s regular web search than our own database.

When looking at alternatives, we were blown away by the accuracy and speed of Google’s enterprise search technology, the Google Search Appliance. DoIT International helped us to set up the GSA and now the results of all searches are 400% to 800% faster than before. All results appear in less than a second, compared to the response time of at least 4 seconds with our previous technology. In 70% of the searches, no further queries are performed and there are no 'next page' clicks, so we know people are finding what they need at the top of the page.

We’re confident that our customers are getting the help and support they need in the timeframe they expect. What’s more, we’re using GSA’s analytics to build out our database. If we spot lots of customers searching for the same thing, we add a new result or ‘how to’ guide or use the feedback to identify and address an issue before it has even been officially logged. All thanks to the speed, accuracy and ease of use of the GSA.

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Artwork powered by Chromebooks at the Polaroid Fotobar

Posted by George Garcia, CIO, TWS Partnership

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is TWS Partnership’s Chief Information Officer, George Garcia, who deployed Chromeboxes at Polaroid Fotobar stores. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

At the Polaroid Fotobar in Delray Beach, Florida, we help visitors create beautiful physical artwork from their digital pictures. When customers visit the store, they can use our Chromebox kiosks and web-based photo editor to add effects and print their photos on lucite, metal, acrylic, bamboo, or other creative materials.

We just opened our second store at Union Station in Washington, D.C., and are opening several other locations this year. For our photo kiosks, we wanted technology that delivers both a great customer experience and was simple to manage, so we could grow quickly.

Customers like using Chromebox kiosks - they resume instantly, are lightning-fast at handling web apps and basically crash-free. Our business colleagues are happy because the Chromebox is a fraction of the cost of other options we considered. And, as the tech team that has to make everything work, we’re thrilled with how the Chromebox is performing.

We’re using the managed public sessions feature, available in the Chrome Management Console, to create a custom Fotobar kiosk experience for customers, including setting a branded home screen, adding photo editing apps and photo sources, and blocking sites we don’t want customers visiting. The public sessions feature also wipes any customer data at the end of each browsing session, so each user is starting fresh.

Since all the operating system updates are automatic and the devices have built-in virus protection, we can spend less time maintaining devices and more time on our expansion plans. We look forward to bringing the fun of our Polaroid Fotobar service to more people around the world soon.

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