Seventy percent of employees expect to use personal collaboration tools more in the future, often to the dismay of the IT department, because they can’t find a suitable corporate alternative to manage the ever increasing number of business connections – an average British decision maker manages 3,852 business connections annually, more than any other country surveyed.
“This research confirms what we have been hearing from our customers: BYOD and the use of consumer cloud apps is a response to limitations in enterprise productivity tools - not a revolution against IT,” said Doug Dennerline, CEO of Alfresco. “This survey shows that progressive IT organizations are listening and in fact, are often driving the use of disruptive tools despite being caught between enterprise requirements and user needs. With so much work happening beyond enterprise walls, it is time for a new class of enterprise tools that meet both user and enterprise productivity needs.”
According to employees surveyed, 78 percent of business users see their number of business connections increasing by 20 percent over the next two years as they rely on greater communications with customers (57%), employees based off-site (55%) and employees based on-site (51%) to propel business. Yet only 18 percent of respondents describe their company as extremely effective at connecting people and sharing knowledge to move business forward.
Key report findings, include:
Security drives decision-making; users focus on speed while IT targets compliance
●Globally, 70 percent see the trend of employees using their own personal collaboration tools and applications for work purposes increasing.
●The most common methods to share business documents in the last 12 months among business users are: work email (89%), personal email (54%), via USB stick or CD (53%) and instant messaging (44%).
●Security and speed shape how business decision makers (BDM) share documents. The key drivers for BDMs when choosing how to share documents are document security (56%) and company network security (53%).
●40 percent of IT decision makers surveyed consider compliance the biggest challenge.
British business decision makers are the most connected
●Brits have the highest number of business contacts of eight countries surveyed. With 3852 connections, they’re ahead of Germany (3747), France (1967), US (1725), India (1714), Spain (1443), Italy (356) and Japan (309).
●44 percent of the workforce is mobile (with mobile access to documents and email), below the global average of 47 percent.
Employees are frustrated with BYOD limitations
●84% of business users have experienced issues with sending and exchanging large files over the past 12 months.
●Business users are frustrated by: managing email volumes (49%), time spent looking for documents (44%) and the number of different versions of documents (38%).
Employee demands are being heard; IT is moving, but not fast enough
●IT departments lead the use of more innovative collaboration tools such as public cloud sharing (39%) and private cloud sharing (48%)
●87 percent of IT decision makers see it as important for mobile workers to be able to collaborate on documents using tablets and smartphones.
●82 percent want to be able to integrate cloud and on-premise systems.
●88 percent think partners, clients and suppliers should be able to collaborate with on processes not just documents with only 28 percent of employees believe IT is responsive.