Case study Digital Transformation Case Study with Craig Wallace from CGI

Craig talks about how SharpCloud is allowing him, his team and clients to share information, knowledge, ideas and thoughts intuitively and effectively, co-creating collective intelligence across their enterprise.

The business problem

There were several problems. Firstly, we needed to ensure that we were leveraging our experience across the CGI group, across the world, so we could establish a consistent and thought leading proposition for digital transformation.

Secondly, to support the fact that we're operating in a more dynamic market, we needed the ability to easily keep an organization's strategic and digital roadmaps current and always up to date.

Thirdly, we wanted to assist in improving communication within organizations about their digital transformation journey.

Why had other tools not solved this problem? 

The digital transformation world and indeed the topic, is very broad, particularly in terms of the areas it touches across an organisation. Every organization within different industries and different markets approaches it in their own way, depending upon their unique situation and needs. When you put all that together, it's quite a complicated landscape which we need to communicate in a simple way and ensure navigation of that landscape is achieved in a non-linear way.

The connectivity and relationships between the individual components are also important to understand. So, we needed a tool to not only deal with bringing complex information together but allowed people to navigate through the information in a non-linear way, dependent on their needs and show the alignment between the things we are talking about. All of this is important when you're driving organizational change.  

Our Innovation team had been using SharpCloud which is how we came across it, but it wasn't so much about picking the right tool, but having the right use case for the tool, which we did. 

How is SharpCloud solving the problem?

We create SharpCloud stories for our clients which they have access to. These stories act first and foremost as a repository for information, data and knowledge.

SharpCloud acts as a modelling tool for facilitating analysis and discussion, as well as a storytelling tool, to communicate to people the outcomes of work. It's a cloud-based tool which enables us to collaborate easily both within and across organizations.  

Key differentiators and features

"SharpCloud provides the ability to structure your content and for others to collaborate with that content and add their knowledge, comments and feedback, all in one place."

The great thing about SharpCloud is that it's up to your own imagination as to how you create a story within SharpCloud. It has a structure behind it but it's flexibility allows you to create multiple views for your data and develop your story as you wish. Once you've created your story, you can share it with others, people can easily navigate through it to find the information they require, and collaborate with it, building the knowledge and helping to develop the content.

My favourite feature is forms. When you're in a workshop collecting data, it enables everybody to get involved. Everyone can have a form and be adding data which can be seen on the screen, moved around and analyzed immediately. Forms enables collaboration and for everyone to feel part of the process. It also means you can speed up that workshop process because everybody is quickly creating the data that you're going to work on.

Watch this video to discover all features available in SharpCloud for Strategic Planning Workshops.

Benefits  

Personally, one of the biggest benefits of using SharpCloud is that I can create the stories myself and give access to others to collaborate with the story. There is no need to involve IT or the web team, I am not dependent on anyone else to do this.

For the team, there is a huge collaboration benefit. SharpCloud is very good for getting us all on the same page and it's very easy to navigate and find the relevant information in the stories we're creating, and add to them.

For the organization, we're driving best practice, being more productive and generating better quality outputs as SharpCloud is reducing the time it takes to carry out the work. We're not having to reinvent the wheel and we can focus more on the content rather than the technology.

Results

We have been able to develop a methodology of best practice around the world, very quickly and at a fraction of the cost of what other people would've invested. 

For our clients, SharpCloud has created a one stop shop for their information, resulting in better communication and better alignment, therefore potentially making the transformation programmes more successful. This could have a massive impact for clients.

These transformation programmes are huge...how do you communicate where you are and how do you keep stakeholders informed and happy? SharpCloud is helping to do this which could result in a more successful transformation, which for some clients could add up to millions. 

"For CGI, it gives us the edge, clients have told us they have never seen anything like it before. SharpCloud facilitates a better dialogue, better discussion and a better outcome. It provides an interactive environment where we can focus more on dialogue and conversation resulting in quicker and more informed decisions."