Published on the 24/02/2016 | Written by Beverley Head
Australians’ “convict heritage” could be the reason why employees are leveraging consumer grade collaboration platforms more widely than their international peers…
It seems a pretty long bow to draw, but Michael Slip, general manager of Dimension Data’s customer experience and collaboration business unit, said that tools such as Skype, Whatsapp, even Facebook were being used to share corporate information because Australians’ convict heritage made them culturally “more prepared to give it a go even if the establishment says you’ve got to clear it”.
Slip warned that there were risks with this approach if a corporate was exposed to “poor quality” on some of those platforms that could impact its brand.
A global survey of 900 business people, including CIOs and IT directors, 105 of whom are based in Australia, has revealed some interesting insights about the way in which collaboration platforms are being deployed. It was this research, released today by Dimension Data, that found that Australians were significantly more willing to risk using consumer grade systems in business than their international peers.
In all, 28 percent of Australian respondents said they used consumer grade tools, compared to just 17 percent internationally.
Slip said that it was important the enterprise IT department understood the phenomenon, “embrace it and become a governance engine” for collaboration.
The value of collaboration is taken almost as an article of faith in modern enterprises, but the ROI of investment in collaboration platforms can be hard to measure.
Unlike international peers which tend to use the technical quality of collaboration platforms as a yardstick of their success, Australian organisations place more emphasis on user uptake and cost savings. It’s a ‘never mind the quality, feel the width’ mindset.
The true value of collaboration appears to be very hard to quantify for most organisations. According to the global survey, one in five organisations said collaboration had not improved their competitive positioning, though an overwhelming majority agreed that it had improved teamwork and accelerated decision making.
Slip however noted that without proper governance collaboration was often insular, focused only on internal stakeholders, and collaboration platforms were not generally available to external stakeholders, such as suppliers and partners, limiting their reach and value.
