Improved Collaboration Tools Ranked In Top 3 of Critical Initiatives for CIOs

Posted by Adobe

Asked about key IT initiatives from 2012, CIOs ranked improving collaboration tools third -- behind cloud services and virtualization. Collaboration concerns beat out big data and analytics, application consolidation, security and risk management, and a host of other key IT initiatives.

Understandable considering it directly contributes to these issues - mostly security and risk management.

In a recent IDC global survey of information workers and IT professionals in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan to better understand today's information worker needs and challenges. The survey found that information workers waste a significant amount of time each week dealing with a variety of challenges related to working with documents. Adobe (the whitepaper's sponsor) has also illustrated in this infographic how an estimated productivity lost by an organization with 1,000 employees costs more than $15 million in waste.

Time spent unraveling version control issues that are created by awkward collaborative processes and consolidating data from forms completely wasted valuable time. Similarly, the study's findings estimate conservatively that a quarter of the time information workers spend gathering and consolidating feedback and deciphering that feedback could be eliminated through the use of better document-based collaboration tools.

Because information work involves a significant amount of outside collaboration, the tools that IT provides must address the security concerns that arise when documents are shared with people outside the firewall. The study recommends that this requires adoption of document-based tools and best practices that minimize the chance of information leaks, an already rapidly increasing problem in many organizations.

Of course, the first step is closing the perception gaps between information workers and IT.

Read the full report for more findings as well as recommendations for helping CIOs improve productivity for their organization's critical collaboration focused missions.