How do your employees collaborate? Are they using Skype, Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams or some other tool? If you had to take a guess, how many collaboration services is your business running, 1, 2, 5? Do you have a strategy to protect sensitive information?
Depending on your organization’s size, it’s likely 2-3 solutions and that could spell trouble for your business.
A recent survey of 247 information technology, executive and operations professionals asked how your employees collaborate? The survey revealed that, on average, businesses are running 2.4 collaboration tools. Unfortunately, 25% of those solutions were put in place by shadow IT (aka tech-savvy employees), like our fictional friend ‘DIY Devin’. From the survey, we can learn a lot about how businesses view collaboration tools.
Survey Results:
Uh Oh #1 – When we asked these organizations if they preferred having a single solution, 56% said ‘yes.’ In contrast, only 14% noted they preferred having multiple collaboration solutions. How will these businesses choose a system and enforce adoption?
Uh Oh #2 – About half of the businesses surveyed (47.5%) told us that their preferred collaboration system must integrate with their communications solution. In this case, what will those businesses do with the thousands of files, conversations, and meetings that cannot be easily ported to a single solution?
Uh Oh #3 (stay with me here …) – The fight for supremacy in this space is over. Microsoft just announced that they have 20 million active daily users, and we’ve known for a while that Teams is the fastest adopted service in Microsoft’s history. Does this mean that Teams is right for you?
With that said, according to our survey:
- 41.5% of organizations are using Microsoft Teams today and 36.5% plan to deploy Microsoft Teams in the near future.
- Assuming half of the undecided businesses in ‘Uh Oh #2’ decide they want a unified collaboration and communications solution, it’s reasonable to expect that they many will also be using Microsoft Teams.
- Here’s the rub. Microsoft Teams doesn’t support all of the enterprise voice features required by mid-market and enterprise businesses!
Interesting findings from the survey.
The top 5 collaboration services being used are:
- Skype – by 43.5%
- Microsoft Teams – 41.5%
- Cisco WebEx – 34.5%
- Zoom – 28%
- Slack – 26.5%
Top three reasons for investing in new collaboration/communications tools:
- Operational efficiencies
- Greater employee productivity
- Improving customer experience
Top three features businesses are looking for in their collaboration tools:
- Group sharing of files
- Instant messaging and presence
- On-demand video meetings/video conferencing
Once again, how do your employees collaborate? What are your needs and concerns regarding security? Even if you have not given it much thought, give us a call at All Synced at 770-835-4600. As you know, we are more than happy to schedule a few minutes to understand your needs. From there, we will make suggestions to enhance your connectivity, your business IT security and your ability to collaborate with both team members and customers.
About the survey:
Evolve IP conducted this online, unbranded survey in the Fall of 2019. 84% of respondents were from North America and the remaining 16% responded from the EU / UK. 80% of survey respondents work in IT while 11% were non-IT C-Suite executives. 9% work in finance or operations. Mid-sized business with employee sizes from 100 – 4,999 made up 57.5% of all responses, 31% were smaller businesses with 1 – 99 associates, and 11.5% had over 5,000 employees.
For more info, see the original Evolve survey.