“Application sprawl” is the term Kris Wood uses to describe it. The practice, common in most business environments, of using numerous different software platforms and tools for a variety of different tasks and purposes.
You want to send an email, you open your email client, or log in to your webmail account on your browser. You want to message a member of your team, you open up a chat application. You want to make a call, you open up the softphone app, or else use a telephone. You want to schedule a meeting, you check your calendar, then message around contacts with suggested dates.
This is how huge numbers of people are used to working. But according to Kris Wood, who is Fuze’s EMEA vice president, business and IT leaders are starting to wake up to the fact that this piecemeal approach to software deployment does not necessarily do much for efficiency and streamlining. And he argues that the evolution of UC towards team collaboration is playing a key role in opening up minds to the fact that there is a different way.
“To avoid complexity, businesses need a single application that covers multiple interaction modes rather than individual software clients for different ways of communicating,” he said. “Application sprawl, where employees switch between tools and devices to share, connect, and communicate at work, is a stark reality in most enterprises and IT leaders must focus on removing clutter from the user’s overall application estate.”
User benefits
This ‘clutter’ is, according to Kris, a major culprit when it comes to businesses struggling to get employee buy-in for new technology. The sheer rate at which new tools are introduced leads to a kind of application fatigue, where the burden of different technologies actually starts to make work feel harder, rather than easier.
“User experience is the driver for any successful IT and communications deployment,” said Kris. “When investing in collaboration solutions, or any IT for that matter, it’s important to shift the focus from the platform and infrastructure and instead focus on the user benefits and broader collaboration opportunities in the cloud.
“As you’d expect, I’d recommend Fuze when it comes to collaboration and communications, but whatever platforms businesses choose to work with, the important thing is that they incorporate everything under one roof. Employees can’t be expected to carry around a work phone, and install a softphone, and a chat app, and a cloud-storage app, and a video conferencing system.
“To maximise productivity in the long run, employees need tools that can do everything in one place, from voice, to video, to chat. The whole process needs to be as simple as possible – both for IT departments to manage and the employees to adopt.”
Security requires buy-in
Kris also makes the important point that the complexity caused by running many different applications raises a number of security concerns. The most significant of these revolve around the practice of employees downloading their own preferred apps to use at work.
“Shadow IT is becoming more prevalent, with employees increasingly using devices and software that are outside of IT’s control,” said Kris. “Fuze’s research reveals that 32 per cent of employees are using their personal mobile messaging apps for work purposes, whilst 25 per cent are using video calling and 28 per cent are using social media.”
Centralised control and oversight of what applications are being used on the network is essential if businesses are to successfully defend themselves against the growing threat from cyber crime. For Kris, however, wresting back control of what platforms are used in the workplace needs to be accompanied by an understanding of why employees want to use their own solutions in the first place. If businesses want to tighten up infrastructure security, they must have buy in from the people who use it.
“[Shadow IT] indicates a frustration with existing, sanctioned” IT systems,” said Kris. “Businesses need to understand that there is much less division between work and personal communications, employees expect to communicate across a variety of channels without having to consider if that communication is personal or business related.
“The convergence of those communications in the workplace is down to the fact that businesses do not have the right tools in place to separate different platforms and channels in a convenient way. The personal platforms are typically easier to use, so employees gravitate towards them, and that leads to employees going against company policies.
“Workplace communications need to be in sync with what employees are using in their personal lives or they’ll switch to using non-sanctioned apps for messaging and communication.”
Consistent across a business
Any resolution must not only properly consider user needs and preferences, but also be consistent across an entire business. Addressing IT one department at a time will only end up repeating the same problems.
“Without an enterprise-wide strategy in place, many businesses will find themselves faced with a piecemeal approach to technology deployment all over again,” said Kris. “This disjointed vision leads to a lack of continuity across departments, with little consideration for how technologies will integrate or how this will impact the user experience.”
Kris already sees recognisable trends emerging from the influence personal communications platforms are having on business telecoms. Like many in the industry, he sees the popularity of IM or chat applications in particular as playing a major role in how UC and team collaboration shape up in the future.
“The integration of chat applications within the majority of UC platforms will signal a significant shift in the way people use instant messaging,” he said. “Chat functions will replace email as the dominant form of internal office communication.”
Again, the reason why IM-based team collaboration solutions are proving so popular is that they offer simplicity, familiarity and integration. Unlike email, conversations take place in real time, on a single screen, and it is easy to scale up or down with different numbers of participants. Rather than file attachments having to be previewed or opened in their own programme for editing, collaboration software allows shared items to be viewed in the same interface, talked about, annotated, edited as the conversation progresses.
This, for Kris and many other in the industry, is why team collaboration offers the perfect antidote to “application sprawl”. By focusing on integration and simplicity, user needs can be successfully accommodated within a single, central, business wide solution.
