Is collaboration in your organization like a 3-ring circus? Are you the ringmaster or the clown; the trapeze artist or the animal tamer?
Most enterprises are going through a vast transformation around collaboration. No longer are the 1.0 tools (SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) meeting the needs of the line of business or those with collaborative needs in sales, marketing, support, R&D, etc.
Since most collaboration tools are in the cloud, they are just going out and finding their own "acts" so to speak in new collaborative solutions more tailored to their specific problem or context.
Trying to keep the old collaboration tools going is the ringmaster’s role, the trapeze artist is a group looking at new tools and trying to strike a balance between the old and the new. The lion tamer is a group that has adopted a new collaboration tool whether IT approves or not, and the clown is off in left field looking at new collaboration technologies with no eye towards their appropriateness within your enterprise.
Which role are you?
The Ringmaster
These days IT is in a tough place trying to hold it all together and keep things secure. Many of the IT groups we talk with are still trying to put the horse back in the barn (to keep with the horse metaphor), and that just does not work. Most of the conversations we have with these ring masters are very emotional. It really is not about the technology, but is about control.
Who wants to be told that over the last few years they have spent millions on SharePoint only to have people use it as a document repository, and a poor one at that! Microsoft sold SharePoint with the promise of true collaboration and when it did not quite work out that way, different groups went off to find their own solutions and became the trapeze artists, the lion tamers and even the clowns!
The question for IT today is do we continue with these big monolithic systems that are based on pre-Internet architectures, or do we cut our losses and go with something more modern? I currently have 208 apps on my iPhone. I paid nothing or little for each of them. I did not spend millions, need to create an infrastructure, get new hardware, negotiate licenses and assign a skilled person to keep things running. I just download and use them.
A few apps together can do much of what the big monolithic systems can. Instead of Exchange I can try to cut down on my email and use Box or Dropbox for content storage, sharing and synchronization. I use Meetin.gs for my calendaring and scheduling (ok, their native app is not quite out yet) I can use Gdrive to share a spreadsheet of receivables with my operations person … you get the idea.
Emotions and Control
When I was doing some work for a client a few years ago, I had an interesting experience that repeated itself over and over at different companies. In this case we had decided on a Unified Communications and Collaboration strategy by doing lots of interviews of all different roles at the company, as well as looking at a variety of vendor offerings (they were using Notes and the CIO wanted to move to SharePoint).
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Source : cmswire[dot]com