Nestled at the top of the world in Finland’s Lapland region, the city of Rovaniemi has plenty to boast about. It has a thriving population of 62,000, a renowned university, and its position in the Arctic Circle makes it perfect for viewing the Northern Lights every winter. But one thing in particular makes the city special to people all over the world: it is the official home of Santa Claus.

“We wanted to make collaboration in the administration easier and have a single location for all our information,” says Harri Ihalainen, CIO at the city of Rovaniemi. “With the Google toolset, you can do that very easily.”

Achieving greater cohesion with Google Workspace

The administration’s existing email and productivity solution was a hybrid of cloud-based applications and locally maintained email and domain servers. However, restrictions to devices and traditional offline methods of working and storing documents meant that the city’s workers were unable to take full advantage of the mobility and flexibility of the cloud.

Since 2013, Rovaniemi’s education department and teachers had been experimenting with Google Workspace, and the benefits began to be noticed elsewhere around the city. In 2016, the city organized a proof of concept to see whether Google Workspace could work in the wider administrative environment. After a successful test run, the administrative and political arms of Rovaniemi’s government decided to run a public tender to rigorously assess and examine all the possible options for a cloud-based productivity platform. By the end of 2017, Google Workspace was declared the winner due mainly to its functionality and cost benefits compared with other options.

Rovaniemi’s existing IT infrastructure was a complex mix of different systems, maintained by a dedicated, publicly owned service company. In these circumstances, teaming up with a cloud specialist made sense, so the city employed Google Cloud Partner Cloudpoint to project manage the transition to Google Workspace. Cloudpoint and the Rovaniemi team migrated over three stages to Google Workspace within two weeks, helping to ensure a speedy deployment while allowing for the unexpected. “Deploying in stages meant that the organization could develop a better understanding and expertise with Google Workspace, as we rolled it out,” says Lauri Kaski, CEO of Cloudpoint.

A happier, more productive workforce

With Google Workspace, the city of Rovaniemi had a productivity platform that helped its employees be more transparent, more collaborative, and more flexible than ever before. Single sign-on with Google means that administrative staff can easily access all the tools and documents they need without sacrificing security. The ability to use Google Workspace from any device, from any location, means that employees can work from home or in the field just as well as if they are in the office.

Features such as sharing calendars and important files on Drive have not only improved collaboration, but also helped to improve efficiency and reduce costs at a time during renovations of the city hall. “Half of the administration staff work there and have had to be dispersed in various offices around the city,” says Harri. “Google has made that transition much easier to deal with.”

Throughout the transition, Cloudpoint made sure to develop strong feedback loops with questionnaires and surveys at every stage of the deployment using Forms. “After six months of using the tools, we’ve found that staff are happier and more productive,” says Lauri. “They definitely prefer Google Workspace to the previous solution.”