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July 16, 2008
Controlling Collaboration
The good news is today’s document-management applications are getting so easy to use, typical line-of-business people can manage their information on their own without eliciting the help of technical experts. Unfortunately, that’s also the bad news.
Easy-to-use document-management is part of a trend spurred in part by Web content-management advances that found ways to let business users single handedly post or edit content without having to call on IT for the relatively mundane job of converting text to HTML and then posting the information.
Before that was possible, “only a few people in a given organization would end up using [content management systems] on a consistent basis,” notes Jim Murphy, research director for AMR Research. “What we’ve seen lately is a richer interaction [among general users] over the Web in terms of technology. They have become more savvy about these tools.”
This, combined with what Murphy calls “a pent up need” for better document version controls across enterprises, is resulting in document-management systems with straightforward interfaces that hide some of the technical challenges of managing electronic documents.
But now Web 2.0 and other collaboration tools are complicating the drive for simplicity. “When you have things like blogs and wikis, where everybody in the world can publish to the Web, it’s so accessible it’s ridiculous,” Murphy says. “So companies are now saying they want to be able to leverage that usability, but they still need to control it, [in part because of] legal risks.”
Solution providers can help clients balance collaboration and control with tools available for ensuring security, compliance, and worker productivity. In addition, solution providers can help customers formulate a policy that restricts employees from accessing the Facebook Web site, blogs, and wikis that aren’t directly related to company business.
At the same time, companies can give their staff access to collaboration outlets that are sanctioned by the organization. “They can tell workers, ‘You can use this tool as long as long as it’s behind the firewall,” Murphy says. “There are various ways of approaching [social collaboration]. Some companies are very locked down in terms of what they allow. Some companies are extremely open and just kind of let it go. The answer should be somewhere in between, but it’s hard to find what that [balance is] right now.”
Posted by ajoch at July 16, 2008 08:15 PM
