June 19, 2013

Top 10 Benefits Of Social Collaboration To An IT Department And CIO

By CloudTweaks

Social Collaboration To An IT Department

1. Protect network information, while enabling internal and external collaboration in your company: Social collaboration offers individuals, project teams, IT departments and even entire organizations the ability to drive both internal and external interaction in a secure environment. IT benefits from a reduced risk of external individuals having access to the company’s private network. Many professionals are concerned about the possibility of their network credentials being exposed to the public. Secure social collaboration platforms can alleviate these concerns, improving internal collaboration while also enabling external collaboration with partners, customers, consultants and others to occur – which is critical in today’s matrixed world.

2. Resolve hyper-sensitive issues faster: Utilizing social collaboration software as a team to solve technical problems can result in faster problem resolution. An on-demand virtual space can provide a secure, global environment where ad hoc teams bring together disparate data, brainstorm, and resolve problems. End users can be engaged directly in a space to enhance collaboration even further. Some successful use cases for this include post-cutover “hypercare” support, critical time-sensitive business process support, and underlying problem management where real-time engagement between system experts and end users can streamline problem resolution.

3. Experience the “pulse” of the issue/project: IT can involve the CIO and other leaders with the issues/projects on which they are working by inviting them to a social collaboration space. The CIO and others can participate in conversations, or even just “listen.” This improves alignment both in terms of message accuracy and timeliness, allowing IT leadership to have a real-time pulse of the activity rather than having periodic status reports, 1-1s, or meetings solely providing activity insights.

4. Learn faster on pilot projects: Social collaboration software is great for pilot projects. IT can use it to gather feedback, discuss issues, test cases, and provide training materials. The key benefit is the real-time connection among pilot users, along with IT staff. Everyone in the space has visibility to each others’ issues and experience. This leads to faster learning of what is or isn’t working.

5. Enable “peer support,” a best practice for managing/embracing consumerization: Social collaboration software easily facilitates peer-to-peer communities to enable targeted knowledge sharing and issue resolution via peer support rather than IT directly. As consumerization via “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD)/cloud services places more of a demand on your service desk, social collaboration can help better address the situation. Depending on the technology and what IT wants its role to be, IT participation in the peer-to-peer community can be passive or active.

6. Streamline company-wide communication activities: IT departments frequently need to send company-wide communications. Before these messages are sent, they often have to go through multiple iterations and approvals, a tedious process that is often made worse when disparate versions of the message are being passed around in email threads with no revision control. Social collaboration is a proven way to streamline message creation and approval processes, increasing IT staff effectiveness as well as end user experience.

7. Reduce ticket escalation rates: Ongoing knowledge transfer from subject matter experts to first contact teams is critical to minimizing ticket escalation; however, it is often difficult to create a proactive culture for this. Social collaboration both enables experts to easily share information with first contact teams as well as facilitate “ask the experts” type of communities. In this type of social collaboration based community, knowledge sharing doesn’t get restricted to following formal publishing of system documentation or just working the relationships that you know.

8. Reduce administrative burden in today’s fast-paced world: Many popular social collaboration platforms are too heavy for many team leaders, requiring them to depend on IT to spend time creating a site for teams, putting up a roadblock in the collaborative process. Easy to use, cloud based platforms empower end users and allow IT to enhance, not hinder, the social collaboration process and focus their technical expertise in more value-added areas.

9. Communication that’s even more private than internal email: Using social collaboration software provides the ability to have private conversations in a way that is different than email. Instead of Executives leveraging personal email accounts as an extra level of internal confidentiality for sensitive situations that shouldn’t be exposed to colleagues — including executive assistants and IT teams, it can provide a more secure and effective alternative for both internal and external collaboration.

10. Reduce frustration caused by individual email inbox limits: Most collaboration happens around large files and email does not support the sharing of these items due to file size and storage limitations. Collaboration in the cloud offers flexible, safe and secure file-sharing capabilities with no size restrictions for the user, eliminating user requests to IT for increased email storage. More people can get involved in reviewing, refining and commenting on shared documents, while large files shared in collaboration platforms are only stored once — rather than multiple times when attached to an email.

By Deb Fitzgerald

As Deltek’s Chief Information Officer (CIO), Deb Fitzgerald is responsible for developing and implementing the technology vision for Deltek worldwide,  including the company’s Kona.com social collaboration. Fitzgerald is a skilled IT executive with over 20 years of experience delivering world-class technology portfolios that drive innovation for companies. Prior to Deltek, she was Vice President of Information Technologies at VeriSign, a leading provider of Internet infrastructure services. 

CloudTweaks

Established in 2009, CloudTweaks is recognized as one of the leading authorities in cloud connected technology information, resources and thought leadership services. Contact us for ways on how to contribute and support our dedicated cloud community.
John Case

Leverage Cloud-based Technology to Expand Business Opportunities

Leverage Cloud-based Technology It’s no secret that the cloud has changed the way business is [...]
Read more

5 Cloud-Based Documentation Tools Compared

Documentation Tools Compared What Are Cloud-Based Documentation Tools? Cloud-based documentation tools are software platforms that [...]
Read more
Gary Bernstein

Unleash the Power of Your Website with These 25 VPS Providers

Simplify Your Website Management with VPS Hosting Updated 10.17.2023 VPS stands for Virtual Private Server, [...]
Read more

5 Reasons You Need DAST to Secure Your Cloud

5 Reasons You Need DAST to Secure Your Cloud What Is DAST? Dynamic Application Security [...]
Read more
Freshworks

Freshservice’s Journey to Streamlining IT Operations

Freshservice, a cloud-based IT service management solution, is a part of Freshworks Inc., a company [...]
Read more

Leading Data Virtualization Solutions: 10 Services Transforming Data Management

10 Services Transforming Data Management Data virtualization is a technology that allows for the integration [...]
Read more

SPONSOR PARTNER

Explore top-tier education with exclusive savings on online courses from MIT, Oxford, and Harvard through our e-learning sponsor. Elevate your career with world-class knowledge. Start now!
© 2024 CloudTweaks. All rights reserved.