Collaborative Businesses Succeed on an ECM Foundation

Business is inherently social: Every day, people work together, share ideas and communicate with each other and with customers and partners. And they do it in more ways and on more platforms than ever before.

Teams and content are more and more decentralized, and digital information is increasing exponentially. The size of the digital universe is expected to roughly double every two years, increasing 50-fold by 2020—but only 10% of enterprises say they have high levels of confidence in their approach to governing digital information.

These market dynamics present challenges but also incredible opportunities. Collaborative business solutions that bring together enterprise content management (ECM) and social tools—securely connecting content to people and people to each other—are driving innovation throughout enterprises.

According to Allen Bonde, partner and principal analyst at Digital Clarity Group, "We have to set aside this idea that we need to become a social business and instead say, ‘We already are social. Now: how can we move forward and turn that into productive business value?'"

How to Outpace Your Competition

To keep up with this rapidly evolving landscape that encompasses anywhere, anytime and on any device, organizations need tools that enable them to work seamlessly as teams, while still remaining compliant and secure.

Consider consumer tools: Social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn are based on connecting individuals and fostering the idea of communities. For businesses, "The root for connection is making it easy to find either other people or find information that's helpful to our day-to-day work," Bonde says. "It's also related to connecting employees with this knowledge and connecting them with information that helps them learn."

It's not just about creating a social network for your enterprise. It's about establishing an ECM foundation and enabling workers to connect to their content and to each other on top of it. Collaborative business works best when ECM supports it unobtrusively in the background, maintaining information governance without disrupting workflow.

Today's end users need enterprise applications to perform as instinctively and quickly as the services they use in their daily lives, while at the same time supporting ECM. Collaborative business solutions help organizations put the right insights and assets at users' fingertips, with transparency that improves efficiencies and opens new channels for knowledge sharing and innovation opportunities.

"It starts with collaboration," Bonde says. "When organizations focus strictly on this part of social business, you can actually see productivity improvements of as high as 25% in terms of empowering your knowledge workers to do their work smarter and faster."

As business boundaries become more elastic, it is imperative to ensure knowledge and information workers can collaborate effectively with partners and colleagues both inside and outside the firewall, without putting information governance and security at risk.

According to a recent study by IDG Research,¹ 86% of knowledge workers placed a very high level of importance on collaborating with internal coworkers and external stakeholders, as well as having access to the most up-to-date corporate information. These leaders have realized the value of collaborating with the right people, locating and sharing the best information, and making informed decisions, all in a timely manner. By combining social tools with secure file sync and share, organizations can provide their workforce with a platform for creative collaboration, faster innovation and greater productivity, all in a consistent and compliant way.

Companies are expanding globally and becoming more and more disparate, often leaving teams disconnected. They are unable to share the knowledge they capture in a single, collaborative environment. Not only is it a challenge for employees to easily connect with one another, but it is also difficult for them to connect with their customers and access the right information in effective and meaningful ways.

By arming users with tools such as blogs, wikis, social communities and real-time team spaces—combined with secure file sync and share tools to help them share content—you can better connect them with their assets, their coworkers and their customers. Failing to adapt to this new, social-powered work environment means decisions are delayed and ?often made using the wrong information, which results in lost productivity and increased risk.

Stay Nimble: Improving Business Responsiveness

Today's workers are more resourceful than ever. A recent survey² found that 65% of respondents work around collaboration obstacles by using email to collaborate with team members outside the company. Although more than a third of them are frustrated by email limitations, they still use it because it works. Even if email is often slow, unsecure and disorganized, they may lack other, more practical options.

If it feels like innovation happens at a snail's pace in your organization, it may be time to reevaluate the platforms your workers are using. Consumer tools simply cannot take the place of enterprise-grade solutions. Information silos, ineffective collaboration tools and disconnected systems that don't speak to one another bog down your organization.

Your workforce needs to be able to work when, where and how they want. Enabling users to incorporate more engagement into their work processes and allow conversations to fuel innovation, your customers, users and partners together can help your business be more responsive to changing requirements. These conversations and acts of sharing are proving to be powerful tools for the co-creation and collaboration that fuels innovation, product development and customer service and relationship management.

But becoming a collaborative business is not something that happens overnight. It is an ongoing redesign of corporate culture—one that builds bridges to work across information silos, moves toward creating a culture of sharing, and encourages innovation among employees and customers alike.

Manage Content with Confidence and Security

The concept of BYOD (bring your own device) has quickly become BYOX, where "x" is defined as any tool necessary to get the job done, including devices, applications, Web services, cloud storage and more. It's tempting to commend the ingenuity of employees, but IT leaders know their organization's content is its lifeblood—and they don't want it roaming around outside the firewall.

It's up to your infrastructure to provide workers with the tools they need to share content and ideas in a controlled environment. An ECM platform that includes a secure, compliant, user-friendly file sync and share solution enables users to work the way they want with a single source of truth, giving you peace of mind.

Leading organizations are seeing the value of combining social business solutions with secure file sync and share tools. Together, they work to keep content at the heart of collaboration. "Content can naturally build conversations," says Bonde. "These conversations then lead you down the collaboration path, which allows you to build connections."

Look for cohesive, dedicated file-sharing applications that excel at three core aspects of the corporate sync and share paradigm: usability, governance and security. Usability is particularly important, since meeting the standards that users expect will ensure they will actually use the tools you've provided. The robust functionality in these tools syncs across devices and provides a consistent platform for collaboration and communication.