Nielsen Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

The Nielsen Company (Nielsen) is well-known and respected marketing research firms, with operations in over 100 countries. Its 56,000 users work to provide insights and data that give customers a better understanding of what people watch, listen to, and buy. Those insights are essential to companies in a variety of industries, including media and entertainment, consumer products, and retail, that must stay in touch with customers in a fast-changing marketplace.

Scope and Challenges

To help customers get the information they need to increase ad sales and boost market share, Nielsen must empower its employees to collaborate across markets and global offices. The company saw an opportunity to improve collaboration by moving productivity apps to the cloud, allowing employees to work anytime, anywhere, and on any device.

Nielsen wanted a productivity suite that it could support anywhere worldwide using the same processes. It also needed an enterprise-ready solution with a rich feature set, broad compatibility, and strong security. After acquiring a company that had successfully transformed collaboration using the Google intelligent apps for business, Nielsen decided to move all its employees to G Suite.

To prevent any disruption to the business during the G Suite migration, Nielsen engaged Maven Wave, a Google Cloud Premier Partner, for professional services assistance. Maven Wave brought a wealth of change management experience, helping Nielsen keep the migration on track.

Outcome and Implications

For multinational firms as large as Nielsen, changing the way employees work isn’t always easy at first. Nielsen approached change management carefully, using consistent messaging and focusing on leadership and employee engagement.

Nielsen conducted a multi-phased approach, focusing on creating a culture of collaboration. The company identified several personas to target. These included general end users, administrative assistants, executive stakeholders, as well as core IT staff and help desk professionals. Nielsen onboarded this last group before other employees since their workload would be most impacted by the change.

Nielsen went live with G Suite to its global community over a single weekend. To highlight the successful launch, Google Guides led celebrations around the world, wearing shirts in Google colors and waving flags to generate enthusiasm.

Today the collaboration between Nielsen, Google, and Maven Wave continues, with Nielsen providing input on product features to help further enhance future G Suite capabilities. Nielsen has also embraced Google App Maker to easily and more securely create custom apps on the same platform used by G Suite.

Quotes

“In keeping with our cloud-first strategy and digital transformation, we wanted to give our employees state-of-the-art collaboration tools. We knew that a global, cloud-based toolset would help change the way everyone in the company works and maximize the value we deliver to our customers.” - said Kimberly Anstett, Chief Information Officer at Nielsen.

“It was clear to us that G Suite was built with enterprise security and workflows in mind,” says Kimberly. “As CIO of a data-driven company, I appreciated that Google understood our privacy requirements and how we need our information assets to be secured. I knew our business was in the right hands.”

“We saw our G Suite migration as an opportunity to help everyone in the company improve their productivity and strengthen our relationships with the 56,000 users we support worldwide,” - said Nerina Martinez, Technology Director at Nielsen.