As organizations focus on modernizing collaboration across internal teams and with customers and partners, the use of cloud-based tools is on the rise. PGA of America, a not-for-profit association with 28,000 golf industry members, faces the same communication and collaboration challenges impacting most organizations today: creating frictionless and secure user experiences.

When still using its legacy collaboration tools, PGA of America encountered ongoing user-experience issues that required a lot of support. The organization believed it would be less susceptible to cybersecurity attacks if members and employees were using a more secure collaboration solution.

With the goal of modernizing its approach to collaboration and communication to better serve PGA of America members and employees, the organization migrated to Google Workspace with support from Google Cloud Premier Partner 66degrees.

Migrating a collaboration suite that hundreds of dispersed workers and tens of thousands of members rely on every day can be problematic, potentially resulting in unanticipated downtime and costs. To avoid this, PGA of America worked with 66degrees to ensure a smooth roll-out that prevented issues post-migration.

66degrees was particularly supportive when it came to change management, providing training and workshops to help the organization better understand Google Workspace. In addition to onsite user education, 66degrees provides a continuous learning portal for all PGA of America employees and members so that everyone knows how to take advantage of capabilities in the solution. As PGA of America was coming from a highly fragmented IT environment with several datastores, 66degrees also helped consolidate and shift file management directly into Google Drive to prevent disruption or loss.

Thanks to training support from 66degrees and powerful collaboration tools in Google Workspace, PGA of America now realizes the benefits of modernized IT. Public relations and marketing staff no longer worry about which version of a document they are editing, as real-time collaboration in Google Docs provides instant visibility.

With the new collaboration solution in place, speed and performance issues have been relegated to the past, while the costs of managing the IT stack have dropped dramatically. Users enjoy the ease and power of Gmail to stay connected without privacy concerns or security risks. Meanwhile, Google Sheets is helping PGA of America—from IT to accounting to marketing—better manage their data and generate insights.

Since beginning to use Google Workspace, the PGA team has seen a 70% reduction in support tickets.

PGA of America has also begun exploring BigQuery and other Google Cloud data solutions. In one case, the organization combined the power of BigQuery with Google Sheets to provide powerful business insights that were unavailable in its legacy ERP system. This opened the doors to further exploring the BigQuery capabilities and encouraged PGA of America to examine other approaches to automation.

PGA of America hopes to use Google Cloud analytics tools to better understand its workforce technology utilization, identify opportunities to tighten up file sharing permissions, and optimize finance, identity automation, and provisioning through BI.