“Content isn’t king, it’s the kingdom,” opened Lee Oden, who in that one statement encapsulated the far reaching impact content has on business today. With similar parallels to the evolution of the IT department, no longer is content siloed in separate departments, but is instead the driving force behind those striving to become a digital business.
Today, it’s not just about having quality content, it’s about how to collaborate on, secure, manage and govern your most important information. Indeed, content has driven the need for a holistic approach to modern business, one where sharing and collaborating is key. Fuelled by increasing globalisation and connectivity, collaboration has evolved both inside and outside the enterprise, with collaborative working extending to stakeholders, customers, and partners, as well as internally with colleagues and peers.
Collaboration is not a new concept for business. Instead, it is the technology enabling a new class of collaboration which is built to meet today’s business challenges. Legacy on-premise content systems are being rapidly left behind, replaced by cloud content management tools which are becoming more and more integrated, intelligent, automated and secure.
Collaboration has long been championed to be a driver of productivity and innovation. It comes as a huge surprise, therefore, to learn that just 9% of those surveyed by Deloitte in a recent report believed that their company had a very effective infrastructure for sharing and collaboration. Hitting home the fact that collaboration breeds productive workers, the same report found that workers were 17% more satisfied with their workplace when they had access to effective collaboration tools.
The report from Deloitte emphasises not only the vital need for collaboration in the workplace, but also reveals the outright necessity for businesses to pick the right tools.
“Those that do not enable the cross-pollination of skills and experiences between their employees are clearly failing to maximise their returns from their investment in those people. At a team, group and organisational level, we believe that organisations should maximise their ability to collaborate and create an environment in which innovation can flourish,” Deloitte’s ‘Digital Collaboration: Delivering innovation, productivity and happiness’ report noted.
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The old guard once in charge of Enterprise content management (ECM) is now being overtaken by cloud content management entrants geared towards providing for the productive, connected workforce.
Case in point is analytics software company FICO, a firm boasting a distributed workforce of 3,000 across six continents and who was struggling with legacy on-premise content systems. The company was struggling to share information both internally and externally, with shadow IT rearing its ugly head as employees looked to quickly share content outside the firewall. Instead of trying to fulfil the demands of its business with fragmented tools, FICO chose a single solution – Box.
“At FICO, we want to maximise our global talent and provide them with the tools to do their jobs better together, Box helped us connect the dots from region to region and from device to device,” said then FICO CIO Tony McGivern.
Box enabled secure collaboration, making both internal and external sharing straightforward and secure – all the while integrating with existing business critical applications.
Collaboration is driven by the need to connect different people – different minds, different opinions, and different viewpoints all combine to drive new ideas, productivity and innovation. Collaborators are defined by their uniqueness and, as such, tools need to be tailored and specific to what collaborators want and need to do. This is again where the likes of Box champion over the old guard of collaboration, with the former boasting various integrations and a myriad of global partners such as Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, Slack and more.
The collaborative tide is turning – businesses must turn away from the siloed, fragmented solutions of yesterday and embrace a cloud-first, single solution which boasts integrations customisable to the wants and needs of the business. Content is the kingdom – and each kingdom needs to connect and collaborate in order to flourish in a digital world.
