How I completely moved my office’s software into the cloud

Ben White didn’t join the family at real estate agency franchise Ray White straight away. Instead, he worked as a consultant in New York before returning in 2005 to manage the company’s property management business.

But he also took on much of the company’s IT responsibilities, and found that the company – which has more than 1,000 locations across Australia, New Zealand, China and south-east Asia – needed an entirely new system.

Instead of relying on an expensive self-hosted suite, White took a punt and went with Google Apps, putting all of the company’s services in the cloud. But there were some challenges, and White says he underestimated just how big a culture shock the move would be.

So how did you come to join the family at Ray White?

I joined the company five years ago. Because we’re a family-owned business I pretty much got in through genetics, but before that I was overseas, living in New York, working in a consulting firm and fell in love with the property management industry.

I joined Ray White back in 2005, driving the property management business. And that’s actually how I started getting involved with Google, because we wanted to build a custom property management platform, and we’re building that now on the Google App engine.

So that’s what prompted the move to the cloud?

Yes, that really started the process for us. We wanted to develop a system where you could build portals, and let people participate, and get them to view their bank statements online, and so on, and then pay rent. This can be solved by building an app.

So why did you choose to implement cloud solutions across the whole business?

We were looking to upgrade our systems anyway, so there were two broad motivations. There was the motivation of, how do we build a good vertical product for our industry? And the other is, how do we support the network generally within the business as a whole?

It’s unusual for such a large business to have so many different IT solutions.

Culturally here the biggest challenge we’ve had in IT as a company is that there’s a belief there that every Ray White business is individual and not owned by us, but by the local business person. We’re here to support them; it’s not like McDonald’s which has a lot of rules and so on about what they can do.

If you have a thousand entrepreneurs and tell them what they should be doing, they likely won’t listen. So why have a policy that says they have to use Dell computers when the guy in Wagga Wagga may be able to get a better deal?

Did you ever think about building your own?

Yes, but the problem here is when you want a custom solution, you go to the IT guys and you say, “I want a system where everyone can do what they want”, and of course they say it costs too much money. You have a fundamental clash of culture.

So you basically reached a point where you knew you had to upgrade.

Everyone accepts the future of the industry is about getting closer to your consumer, understanding what they want, and delivering better services. And we need to get much smarter about how we do these things.

How did you decide on the cloud?

The answer is one of two things – you spend a fortune on building an IT system that provides support to 10,000 people, and the other option is a cloud solution like Google. They’re all about letting people do what they want, and you can build custom apps as well.

And it still has that culture of letting people do what they want, letting them install what they want, and this way we get our own philosophy, and one office doesn’t need to do the same thing as another office.

What kind of road blocks did you run into?

We did have challenges, and one of the biggest challenges we had is that people wanted to exchange one feature in Office for another feature in Google. It was very much a culture shift. So they say “I used to do this”, and then they look for the same features in the apps program.

But it turns out that isn’t easy, because you never get a perfect match. And that surprised me the most about all this, because I just assumed people would take it up and it wouldn’t matter.

You’ve said that you ran into some staff issues as well.

It turns out this is highly disruptive to a large number of people, because it’s deconstructing and then reconstructing the way they work. A lot of stuff our people couldn’t articulate, but when you take features away, all of a sudden they know “I used to do this, and now it’s gone”. So you hit those issues, and we didn’t have project management to deal with it at that level.

So we did come up with the idea of sitting down with people individually, and just asking them what features they want, and going through everything they weren’t comfortable with.

What do you think caused that disruption?

It was the right thing to do, but there were people like myself who think “this is so obvious, what’s the problem?” It was a culture thing, and nothing we didn’t recover from, but we definitely learned a lot from all of it. I underestimated how big a shift it would be.

Does anyone still have trouble?

There are a few people who still use Excel, and I understand why they use it, particularly finance people who use a lot of their business in that way. But for many people if they send me an attachment I just don’t open it, because it’s all in the cloud. You get used to the idea of not having any attachments and different versions of files.

You get a sense of people saying “what an idiot”, but it did work altogether. And once that starts happening people have this moment where they finally get how the system works. It’s not until that moment occurs that people want to change, and it’s almost like for some you have to force it on them after a time.

For other businesses looking at moving into the cloud, what should they be wary of?

My advice would be that you need to get people in a collaboration mindset. You need them to think that this is not going to be the same, but get them working together on how to figure it all at.

What I would also do is have people who are interested in all of it and who are switched on to help the people who may be having trouble. Get non-IT employees as change agents, and help them move along.

You’ll find that people who have been interested into this stuff in their personal life will be more willing to help in the business. Make it a non-IT project, and instead make it a cultural thing. Then it will work.