Surprise! 63% of Business Users Want Technology Provided by IT
San Mateo, California (PRWEB) September 30, 2013 -- Traditional enterprise boundaries are fading as organizations embrace disruptive communications. In a survey of 1,600 global workers carried out for Alfresco by Loudhouse, an independent research agency, reveal user demands are being heard and, if IT can adapt to meet these needs, can drive a new era of enterprise productivity.
“This research confirms what we have been hearing from our customers: BYOD and the use of consumer cloud apps is a response to limitations in enterprise productivity tools - not a revolution against IT,” said Doug Dennerline, CEO of Alfresco. “This survey shows that progressive IT organizations are listening and in fact, are often driving the use of disruptive tools despite being caught between enterprise requirements and user needs. With so much work happening beyond enterprise walls, it is time for a new class of enterprise tools that meet both user and enterprise productivity needs.”
According to employees surveyed, 78 percent of business users see their number of business connections increasing by 20 percent over the next two years as they rely on greater communications with customers (57%), employees based off-site (55%) and employees based on-site (51%) to propel business. Yet only 18 percent of respondents describe their company as extremely effective at connecting people and sharing knowledge to move business forward.
Key report findings, include:
Security drives business and IT decision making; users focus on speed while IT targets compliance.
• Globally, 70 percent see the trend of employees using their own personal collaboration tools and applications for work purposes increasing.
• The most common methods to share business documents in the last 12 months among business users are - work email (89%), personal email (54%), via USB stick / CD (53%) and instant messaging (44%).
• Security and speed shape how business decision makers (BDM) share documents. The key drivers for BDMs when choosing how to share documents are the security of documents (56%) and security of company network (53%).
• 40 percent of IT decision makers surveyed consider compliance the biggest challenge.
Employees are frustrated with BYOD limitations.
• 84 percent of business users have experienced issues with sending and exchanging large files over the past 12 months.
• Business users are frustrated by - managing email volumes (49%), time spent looking for documents (44%) and the number of different versions of documents (38%).
Employee demands are being heard; IT is moving, but not fast enough.
• IT departments lead the use of more innovative collaboration tools such as public cloud sharing (39%) and private cloud sharing (48%) – 49% say they proactively encourage people to use their own cloud-based applications to collaborate at work, while 28% are resistant.
• 87 percent of IT decision makers see it as important for mobile workers to be able to collaborate on documents using tablets and smartphones.
• 82 percent want to be able to integrate cloud and on-premise systems.
• 88 percent think partners, clients and suppliers should be able to collaborate with on processes not just documents, with only 28% of employees believe IT is responsive.
IT’s role needs to become information enablers.
• Business users prefer to use tools mandated by the organization (63%) rather than tools of their own choice (37%).
• 89 percent of business users would like to see a single secure connection to document sharing tools regardless of the device used.
• The nature of the document has a bearing on the choice of sharing method – privacy and confidentiality of the document being the most important consideration (60%), followed by size of the file (57%) and upload speed (47%).
Additional Resources:
• Connected Enterprise Global Survey results
• Connected Enterprise Survey Infographic
• AIIM Seminar Event Series
Research Methodology: 1600 total online interviews across eight global markets were conducted in May 2013 for the Extended Enterprise survey. Organizations that participated had a minimum of 500 employees and spanned a number of industries including financial services, the public sector, publishing and manufacturing.
About Alfresco
Alfresco empowers teams to share, save and manage content on one platform across cloud, on-premise and mobile enterprises. More than 7 million people in over 180 countries use Alfresco to collaborate, process and power over 4 billion files worldwide. Whether on the go or in the office, Alfresco gives Fortune 500 companies a competitive edge to solving market challenges. Founded in 2005, Alfresco is headquartered in Maidenhead, outside of London with U.S. headquarters in San Mateo.
Linsey McNew, Alfresco, +1 (512) 653-0953, [email protected]
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