Sharing Reinvented
Cloud Content Management
ECM has provided an essential service to enterprises, helping them to better capture, organize and track massive quantities of content within their organizations. But the way we do business is fundamentally changing, as are our expectations of business software. While ECM still delivers on many of its promises, the shifting business landscape demands an equivalent shift in the software deployed by today’s IT departments. Let’s take a look at the emerging trends shaping business today, trends that are driving us to rethink and retool in response.
Across all generations, today’s knowledge workers are significantly more Web savvy than ever before, but this evolution has largely been driven by consumer—not enterprise—technologies. Popular consumer applications such as YouTube, Flickr and Facebook are fast, intuitive and don’t require anything extra to get started—three clicks and you can share a picture or a video. And as a result, people actually use them to share: more than 3.5 billion pieces of content are shared1 on Facebook each week, and 20 hours of video2 is uploaded to YouTube every minute. What happens when people bring these expectations into their workplace? Today’s workers—especially millennials who grew up using tools like YouTube—require software that helps them get their job done with the simplicity and usability of the Internet. And if the software offered by their company limits sharing, requires IT intervention or is just plain confusing, Web-based tools are only a click away. Ironically, restrictions that IT may have put into place to create a more secure environment are actually pushing frustrated employees to use external tools outside of IT’s visibility, potentially exposing the company to greater risks.
The workplace itself has also evolved, exploding beyond the traditional boundaries of the office walls. Crucial business functions are frequently handled outside the office by people who aren’t even employees. Today we work with partners, vendors and even customers on a regular basis and constantly need to collaborate beyond the firewall. A marketing department could be considered fully staffed by a single manager who works with a number of agencies and consultants. Outsourcing aside, the workplace is no longer limited to the office itself: according to a study posted in a recent KMWorld3, the top recruiting strategy for companies looking to attract knowledge workers under 40 is to promote flexible telework/telecommute programs in line with “the era of the mobile work force.” These employees need an easy, Web-based way to share when outside of office walls, regardless of location or device.
Today’s IT departments are forced to juggle the demands of the new worker and the realities of the new workplace in addition to security concerns and deflated budgets. These considerations have pushed innovative IT leaders to rethink the amount of infrastructure they want to support versus what could be outsourced, and they’re thinking differently about cloud-based solutions, where all backend systems are managed by the vendor. There are tremendous benefits to IT departments when they are no longer responsible for maintaining servers, installing upgrades and patches and training and supporting users. Without these burdens, IT can focus on driving a company’s ability to innovate and execute, thereby becoming more strategic and business-critical. IT innovators also recognize that if they don’t provide software with the usability of consumer tools—software that empowers sharing across devices and beyond the firewall—Web-savvy workers will use ad hoc applications over which IT has no control.
Reaching for the Cloud
So what’s the solution? Does IT need to clamp down even more on technology use in their companies?
While some might take this path, they risk prompting employee dissatisfaction and reducing productivity. Fortunately, there is a new category of software that can work in conjunction with most businesses’ current systems, such as ECM. Delivered over the Web, these new solutions offer the usability of consumer tools and recognize the need for external sharing, all at a cost amenable to today’s IT budgets.
Cloud content management (CCM) is an emerging category that combines many of the core elements and content focus of ECM with the usability and ease of sharing so prominent in collaboration software. As its name implies, CCM brings the benefits of the cloud—low maintenance, elastic and scalable, with access to content anytime, anywhere, across devices. CCM can fulfill the content management and collaboration needs of small- to medium-sized businesses—in many cases bringing content management to companies previously unable to afford it—and also provide a layer of value on top of ECM solutions already deployed by large enterprises.
The best CCM solutions have open platforms that allow for easy integration across the systems a company has already deployed, as well as connections into other cloud services such as Salesforce.com and Google Apps. This is particularly useful for those businesses that are considering a full move into cloud-based software. Small businesses are leading the way toward operating fully in the cloud, and even larger enterprises are beginning to see their security concerns addressed by large cloud vendors.
But don’t be fooled by the name: CCM is not just ECM delivered over the Internet, or “in the cloud.” True CCM solutions are using the advantages of Web delivery to offer additional functionality above and beyond what ECM solutions provide. For example, CCM can make it easy to view any type of content in a Web browser without even owning the software application that it was created in. Gone are the days of being unable to view content you’ve received because you don’t have the latest version of Microsoft Office, or haven’t invested in Adobe Illustrator. Furthermore, open platforms make it possible to also edit much of this content. This is still an emerging category, but there are immediate opportunities to improve how businesses engage with content, and Box—along with a number of CCM companies—are aspiring to address them.
Today’s new knowledge workers, the expanded workplace and leaner, more strategic IT departments are driving businesses to rethink how they approach content management and collaboration in the enterprise. Whether or not businesses are ready to fully embrace cloud solutions or maintain a hybrid approach with existing infrastructure, providing dynamic, flexible collaboration tools with CCM will enhance productivity and ultimately give IT departments more insight into their organizations.
Founded in 2005, Box.net (www.box.net) provides cloud content management for more than 3.5 million users and companies ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies. Box.net's dynamic, flexible content management and collaboration solution empowers users to access and share content online, and gives IT professionals unprecedented visibility into how content moves within their organizations and beyond.
1 www.facebook.com
2 www.youtube.com
3 www.kmworld.com