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Enterprise Collaboration: Businesses Seek Secure Collaboration with External Partners
Two types of activities are driving much of the activity around new collaboration technologies in businesses today, according to a new report from AIIM:
- Quick and easy content sharing between external partners
- Enablement of mobile-device access to content and approval workflows
Doug Miles, director of market intelligence at AIIM, said that “most organizations now have a large ecosystem of collaborators, including external partners and third parties as well as internal staff. But managing the tools required for such collaboration can be a challenge. While IT support for collaboration beyond the firewall has made great advances, organizations appear to be lacking in the support required to really reap the benefits of collaboration.”
89 percent of business leaders say that formal collaboration tools are vital to the success of their enterprise.
These leaders think that collaboration can help them in the following ways:
- 47 percent say increased productivity
- 46 percent say better sharing and pooling of knowledge
- 36 percent say that it would help them better manage and connect with a dispersed workforce
But there is considerable confusion. 54 percent of business leaders say that the rapid convergence of social collaboration tools is hard to keep up with and productively apply. 71 percent of leaders say that their organization isn’t doing a good job in enabling external collaboration.
For example, in order to collaborate with external partners, many users have by-passed internal security and used consumer cloud file-sharing services such as Dropbox, Skydrive, i-Cloud, Google Drive and YouSendIt. AIIM’s Miles commented that “the convenience and ease-of-use of consumer file-share and sync services make them very attractive for collaboration. But such tools have security implications and organizations must look to provide flexible and easy-to-use collaboration functionality across the business if they really want to discourage use of consumer tools.”
