71% Of Businesses Failing On Enterprise-Grade Collaboration

Shortcomings in enterprise-grade collaborative tools are pushing workers to use unapproved options and opening up companies to problems in the long run.

A survey by the Association for Information and Image Management [AIIM] showed that 89 per cent of respondents think that a formal collaboration tool is a vital component of a company’s infrastructure.

The lack of a tool of that ilk has meant that workers are using the products such as Dropbox, iCloud and OneDrive to communicate with external partners despite the fact that tools of that nature are banned by most businesses.

“As cloud solutions become a part of everyday life, it’s inevitable that employees will begin to use the consumer-grade file-share tools that they recognise to ease business processes if there aren’t suitable alternatives available, even if they aren’t the most effective or secure for business use,” said Piers Linney, co-CEO of Outsourcery.

The survey went on to show that 71 per cent of workers think that the organisation for which they work has shortfalls when it comes to technical support for collaboration. Another 40 per cent admitted to feeling strongly that the business poorly supports collaboration and the adoption of consumer level solutions is likely to continue unless development of enterprise-grade solutions is prioritised.

“This trend towards the adoption of ‘less secure’ collaboration technologies in the workplace is likely to keep growing unless business grade alternatives are developed and implemented by IT teams,” said Linney.

Outsourcery already offers access to secure cloud-based collaboration tools from Microsoft including both Sharepoint and Lync that have the level of protection that many businesses ask for.

“The responsibility to provide these solutions to workers should be felt at all levels of the channel, from the service providers who look to create collaboration solutions, to the resellers who look to solve collaboration issues for their customers, and the senior decision makers in business, who aim to get the best out of their employees. In order for collaboration to continue to grow and be used effectively, steps need to be taken now by all parties involved,” Linney added.