As the years have passed by, the role of the average IT team has changed – thanks in part to the process of digital transformation. Everything from productivity and efficiency, to security and compliance is changing, and IT are being forced to take on more responsibilities than ever. It’s easy to see how some companies are facing the threat of collaboration tool overload.
In fact, according to a survey conducted by Frost & Sullivan, 80% of respondents admitted using non-approved SaaS solutions in the workplace. This means that more employees are collaborating across a range of non-secure devices. Maintaining and deploying the right mixture of technology, while ensuring security is a tough challenge for IT. Before your business starts to face the problems of collaboration tool overload, try these steps.
Step 1: Be Informed
IT professionals are often passionate about new technology, which makes staying informed easier. However, remember that there’s more to gaining knowledge than glancing at your favourite discussion boards and blogs from time to time. Remember, you need to truly understand why people need new tools before you replace legacy technology, and this means educating yourself on all the benefits of the latest technology in your industry.
Step 2: Recognise Employee Needs
Understanding the various pain points of your employees is crucial when it comes to figuring out how technologies can strategically benefit your business. Remember to find out whether there are unique cases among departments, and figure out how the implementation of new technology can benefit separate teams. Each department and team member has a unique collaboration profile, so it’s crucial for IT leaders to understand their company’s collaborative mix.
Step 3: Learn to Prioritise
Despite the constant developments in communication technology, instant messaging, face-to-face video, and mobile applications it’s important to note that conference calling can be easily forgotten. Remember that conference calling is an integral part of the corporate world. Prioritising your audio solutions can be a necessity, particularly as poor audio can ruin crucial meetings. Poor audio limits our ability to communicate effectively, forcing meeting participants to struggle when understanding their co-workers. Make sure that you don’t make your audio needs an afterthought.
Step 4: Remember Integration
Finally, to avoid making employee lives needlessly complicated, it’s important to consider collaboration strategies and tools that fit seamlessly into your strategy. In other words, make sure that the tools you choose will fit into your existing workflows and tools. If your new messaging solution doesn’t integrate with your existing solutions for video and web, or it forces users to work across multiple interfaces just to put a conference together, then your communications strategy is going to struggle. Any conferencing solution that you access for your business should come with seamless paths of integration for existing communications.
Whether you’re looking at the brand-new tools on the market, or a free app that employees seem to be constantly downloading onto their work devices, there’s never a magic bullet for UC strategies. Companies need to think carefully about how the latest technology works within the context of their processes and people. By placing IT at the front of these considerations, companies can stop thinking of IT as the service provider, and start seeing them as the source of an empowered team.
