Who's Using What?
It would be helpful to see a breakdown of the Airbus workforce by roles. The CIO is quoted as talking about engineers' need to collaborate but my guess is they are a minority in the workforce. He also talks about empowering shop floor technicians, the people that actually make things. They could well be the majority by role (but my money's on Admin staff still) but why do they need Google G Suite? What will they do with it? How and when will they access it? Better a company Facebook page or Youtube channel surely?
This decision has ideology/religion at its heart I think. Most Western school leavers join the workforce already up to speed, pretty much, with WORD and EXCEL and many will have used PowerPoint as well. They've been trained for free, if you like. That isn't true of Google G-Suite.
Then you have to add in the consideration that G-Suite just isn't very good, it isn't performant and it's clunky in use.
Add in Google's track record of simply abandoning things and this comes across as a very high-risk decision indeed. People here are talking about Munich, I think Dunkirk might turn out to be more appropriate.
The decision Airbus should have made was to uncouple the two needs. Stick with Microsoft for Office tools like WORD, EXCEL and look elsewhere for the collaboration environment. If they look at a platform like Kahootz (www.kahootz.com) or any of its many competitors, they could achieve much, much more with none of the grating conflicts and additional training/support costs that will inevitably arise with G-Suite, and save bucket loads of cash at the same time.
The Airbus CIO simply hasn't thought this through, hasn't done his homework and has possibly damaged Airbus productivity in the process.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
