Forbes – Top 10 Reasons To Bring Social Collaboration To IT

Many organizations talk about the need for improved social collaboration, but they don’t always understand what it means or how it can impact the company at large. The era of social business is here. Forward-thinking companies are embracing social technologies as a way to better align key parts of their organizations, and IT departments are driving a lot of these initiatives.

“Social collaboration offers individuals, project teams, IT departments and even entire organizations the ability to drive both internal and external interaction in a secure environment,” said Deb Fitzgerald, CIO of Deltek.

Here are 10 benefits to bringing collaboration to an IT department:

1. Protect network information, while enabling internal and external collaboration in your company. 

“Secure social collaboration platforms can alleviate security concerns, improving internal collaboration while also enabling external collaboration with partners, customers, consultants and others to occur,” Fitzgerald said.

2. Build informal bonds.

The collaboration can instantly create a less formal conversation that allows the CIO and anyone in the IT organization to discuss new ideas and problems.

3. Share dashboards and reports easily. 

“Most enterprise social networks can let you take any report or a dashboard and post it directly into the feed and mention CIO or other stakeholders. This is powerful because numbers speak volumes more than opinions,” said Mikhail Malamud, CEO and founder of CloudAware.

4. Lower the failure rate on IT projects. 

“When there’s good collaboration between IT and the CIO, it’s easier to balance the competing priorities of information management and architecture, shifting the emphasis away from which technology to implement and towards how to improve the interactions between people,” said Andrew Dixon, senior vice president with Igloo Software.

5. Streamline company-wide communication activities. 

Social collaboration streamlines message creation and approval processes, increasing IT staff effectiveness as well as end user experience.

6. Reduce administrative burden in today’s fast-paced world. 

Easy to use, cloud-based platforms empower end users and allow IT to enhance, not hinder, the social collaboration process and focus their technical expertise in more value-added areas, Fitzgerald said.

7. Ensure that the right people get access to the right information. 

No one understands the value of a business’ information better than representatives from the business, said David Gibson, vice president of strategy with Varonis. IT must align the data to “data owners,” and collaborate with them to make sure data is correctly accessible, used appropriately, and archived or deleted appropriately.

8. Grow the business.

Social enterprise is not just about technology, it’s about lifestyle. “Enterprises that collaborate socially, and not just through social media, with their employees are able to not only grow mindshare, but business as well,” said Vala Afshar, CMO and chief customer officer of Enterasys.

9. Communicate securely. 

Instead of executives leveraging personal email accounts as an extra level of internal confidentiality for sensitive situations, social collaboration software can provide a more secure and effective alternative.

10. Reduce frustration caused by individual email inbox limits. 

Most collaboration happens around large files, and email does not support the sharing of these items due to file size and storage limitations. Collaboration in the cloud offers flexible, safe and secure file-sharing capabilities with no size restrictions for the user, eliminating user requests to IT for increased email storage, allowing more people to get involved, Fitzgerald said.

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