CSC elevates workplace agility, cultivates new market opportunities with Office 365
Today’s post was contributed by Dan Hushon, chief technology officer for CSC.
Innovation never stops in the IT services market, and CSC leads clients through continuous adaptation. We adopt the latest technology to stay ahead of industry trends—mobility, consumerization of corporate IT, collaboration and cloud computing—and to help our clients solve their business challenges using the solutions that we have vetted. When it comes to finding and deploying the best cloud-based business productivity tools, we chose Microsoft Office 365. Today, we are redefining workplace business solutions to achieve the agility, collaboration and global productivity that we need to serve clients as they transform to a true “as a service” economy.
We are using Office 365 to redesign our global workplace into a flexible, connected and mobile environment. As you can imagine, CSC has a lot of intellectual property, thanks to our work in the healthcare, insurance, finance and other sectors. Each of our public sector clients works with a unique and complex set of regulatory controls. When global teams use Office 365 to collaborate and share their knowledge about compliance and data security, they can build on our reputation for service and expertise. And due to the built-in security of Office 365, employees can more rigorously safeguard our clients’ and CSC information alike.
Having true mobility is the cornerstone of this new way of working at CSC. We are really excited about Office 365 because it doesn’t matter if you use a PC, a Mac, an iPad or a Windows Phone, it just works. So with Office 365, we can accommodate the workplace mobility and agility expected by millennials.
Today, Skype for Business Online is the foundation for a new, mobile approach to our global business meetings. Employees join meetings from any device and so can our clients. And with OneDrive for Business online document storage, we maintain our own backups in the cloud, with mobile access to the documents we need, when we need them.
CSC is using SharePoint Online for a new company intranet called CSC WorkShare. It promotes ad-hoc, virtual teamwork with user-friendly collaboration environments. Having the ability to quickly set up highly secure sites among colleagues and with clients is a huge step forward for rapid, proactive customer service. And the ability to make simultaneous changes online against a single document is an important advantage for CSC as we strive to increase the pace of our service delivery.
We are also improving our information and data insight. This is another benefit of Office 365, thanks to its easily adopted analytical tools. Our business users take advantage of Power BI to develop their own data insights and build reports, which they can share on SharePoint Online–based collaboration sites. This is just another example of making it really easy for our employees to be productive.
It has been an interesting journey as we transition our workplace to a modern, connected and agile environment to boost productivity. We worked with Microsoft FastTrack to migrate 55,000 employees to Exchange Online in three key phases: from a pilot, to a regional to a global model, all in five weeks. During the migration, we experienced firsthand the benefit of the hybrid model, leaving some users on-premises while migrating others to the cloud. Today, we can take the Office 365 hybrid story to our clients who want to transition to the cloud at their own pace, with the confidence of having done it ourselves. In fact, the whole Office 365 experience at CSC lends credence to our intent to transition from a systems integrator to a service integrator—and reap the benefit of a huge market wanting to follow our example.
—Dan Hushon
