I was intrigued earlier in the week by a comment made by one of my friends who is doing a lot of work in the collaboration and knowledge management area. 
He told me about the difficulties he had with the IT department and the lack of support he got for the collaboration tools we use. He made the comment “its like if they want to push us to the cloud”. That actually got me thinking. Indeed, IT departments don’t look at collaboration and knowledge management environments as being critical applications, and in times where budgets are down, where resources are reducing, the first things for which support is reduced are these. Does this actually make sense in a business environment where companies are globalizing, travel budgets are reduced and collaboration increasingly becomes important.
As the number of “Generation Y” workers (born between 1975-1995) surpasses the baby boomers, the social networking literacy increases drastically. With the IT departments not providing the appropriate support systems, the tendency is to use the social networking tools instead. Unfortunately in the current circumstances this exposes enterprises to three key issues:
- First, the level of security of most of the on-line collaboration platforms, at least the free ones (the ones most people turn to), have not been audited. This potentially exposes company confidential information to the world and may result in competitors getting hold of key information early
- What happens in the cloud is completely outside the company's control and makes Sarbane-Oxley and Basel 2 compliance difficult to prove
- Third, this now puts key company information in the hands of a third party that might be subpoenaed to release the information to court without the agreement of the owner in case of a court case. Legal departments see this as a nightmare scenario.
In a cover story, titled “Innovation meets Collaboration”, AT&T describes some of the issues related with internet based collaboration, pointing out though that the gap between the companies that take advantage of the internet and the ones who don’t is widening.
As IT budgets reduce and employees look outside the company for tools to collaborate, it is mandatory that a clear approach is taken and that all implications, including security and legal ones, are reviewed prior a decision is made. Many employees today are not aware of the implications and threats caused by moving documents and confidential information to the internet. I do not advocate the status quo, but rather to approach the problem with eyes wide open. Moving forward, companies will have unhappy surprises, just make sure it is not yours.
2 comments:
This post provides true insights in adoption of collaboration technologies.
Collaboration is still in "nice to have" category for most of the IT departments. But there are verticals where 3C falls under 'must have' category and is serious business requirement, for instance business organizations dealing in 'Content', consulting firms, research organizations, media organizations, law firms, publishers etc. where content collaboration (sharing primarly) plays important business role.
For the sake of data security, enterprises looking at adopting collaboration solutions should deep dive in search of a suitable product or services and should not let market noise defeat their requirement. A number of enterprises are in this phase, if they are looking for collaboration solutions, they are finding solutions that comes very close to their requirement, has (or can have) integration capabilities with their existing apps, cost effective, installed and run behind their firewall. Enterprises are also looking at OpenSource collaboration software products like cyn.in (http://cyn.in), alfresco (http://www.alfresco.com/) etc. e.g. cyn.in (http://cyn.in ) is an open source collaboration software appliance that can be installed behind an enterprise’s firewall. Open source software also allows companies to get the software customized as per their requirement at a competitive rate between the main provider and other professional providers in the opensource development stream.
Anil, I agree with your point that collaboration is a nice to have for many companies. However I listened earlier in the week to an interesting webcast at SCMWorld.org, where Hau Lee, Yossi Sheffy, Martin Christopher and two representatives of large enterprises discussed how companies should address the current crisis. Increased collaboration with key suppliers to understand their financial position came up as one of the key elements, together with visibility, to reduce risk in the, often global, supply chains. I see leading companies slowly but surely starting to recognize the need for collaboration. However, the tools are not yet at the level where they ought to be, unfortunately. And customizing tools for their own use, as you suggest, may not be the solution as the supplier may have to collaborate with multiple customers and does not want to have a different tool for each of them.
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