First the Consumerism of IT brought hardware (ie. smartphones) into the workplace. Now workers appear to be going further by bringing their own software into the office as well.
eWeek just published a report on the evolving trend of mobility. The report featured this scary stat: 66% of workers surveyed are using free versions of simple file sharing sites for collaboration – and 55% of those people do so without alerting their IT departments. As the article suggests, this poses a risk to corporate assets, sensitive information and intellectual property being distributed, modified and stored without authorization.
What we can hypothesize from the article is that many are using their own free personal accounts on these sites, full of their personal photos and other large files, to simply share that ‘too big for email’ document. By sharing using the personal account, the information is temporarily (or worse permanently) outside the control of the organization. For IT departments, the stewards of information control and governance, this is not a good trend.
While these ‘simple’ sites make it easy share and access information from anywhere — these attributes shouldn’t override the need for good information governance and management. Many workers don’t understand the challenges and issues created when IT and the organization don’t have a centralized view of data, documents, and content — in case there is a need access or delete the file or content (especially when the worker leaves the organization). However, from the end user perspective, what is easy to use gets used.
The ideal solution is to provide a quick way to share files without giving up control or management their information, documents, and files over their lifespan. That’s what needs to come next. Call it User Friendly Document and Content Management.
Now the sales pitch: That day is here. DOCOVA.net, our soon to be released cloud content service, gives workers the simplicity of File Sharing and gives IT the sophistication of document management – all delivered in the private or public cloud or traditional on-premise. Enable the ‘work anywhere, anytime’ desire — without losing complete control. Easy and simple, accessible for workers, accessible for IT. That’s the DOCOVA way.
