Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication:

What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

March 2015

Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication: What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

Introduction
Communication is critical to the success of any business. But many companies are finding that today's more
widely dispersed and more mobile workforce makes it harder to provide a way for employees to effectively
collaborate. And if your organization is like most, IT resources and budgets are probably tight. So any effort to
increase communication and collaboration has to be done with a keen eye on the bottom line.
That's where the Cloud can play a role. A Cloud-based unified communications and collaboration solution offers
cost savings and helps companies quickly realize the benefits of improved collaboration.
A recent survey of IT professionals conducted by Slashdot Media asked four key questions about their plans for
collaboration and communication and the importance of different factors when undertaking such efforts. Here
are the results of that survey.

Question 1: Which of these collaboration tools does your organization use most frequently?
To ensure success and end-user
adoption, communication, and
collaboration solutions must be
easy to use, work with existing
applications, and provide a level of
integration to simplify the way
employees do their jobs.

9%
18%
Email
9%

63%

File Sharing
Texting/Messaging

Web Meetings
With such criteria, it should be no
surprise that email is the most
widely used tool for collaboration
in most companies. Sixty-three
percent of respondents said their
organization uses email most
frequently for collaboration. Email is pervasive and allows workers to easily exchange information in the body
of a message, attach relevant files, loop people into a discussion as needed, and provide a message thread to
help understand the progress and evolution of a project. However, email collaboration can lead to mailboxes
clogged with attachments and leave it unclear who has edited what.

In some situations, the need for speed may require more immediate attention. For example, if an important
client is on the phone with a question, sending an email to colleagues for help might not get a fast enough
response to resolve the issue on the spot. This is an area where texting and messaging can come in handy. In
our survey, 18 percent of the respondents said texting/messaging is their organizations' most frequently used
collaboration tool.

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Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication: What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

Two other tools were cited as being useful by about the same number of respondents. Nine percent of the
respondents said file sharing is the most frequently used collaboration tool in their organization. And 9 percent
said it was web meetings. Interestingly, both of these techniques have been gaining favor due to the availability
of easy-to-use, Cloud-based solutions. Specifically, while companies might have set up and used dedicated FTP
sites to share files in the past, consumer-oriented services like Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Hightail and others
have made the file-sharing process simple to use and a convenient way to collaborate with geographically
dispersed colleagues and business partners. Similarly, web conferencing for business collaboration is taking off
due to the growing familiarity and ease of use of services like Skype, GoToMeeting and others.

Question 2: What is the biggest roadblock to implementing collaboration in your business?

Getting people in a single office to
collaborate can be challenging
enough. But today's modern
business world relies on remote
Including participants outside
29%
and mobile workers fully
32%
firewall
participating in day-to-day
Mobile device support for
collaboration tools
operations and contributing to
16%
group projects. Additionally, today
Presence/messaging/web
24%
meetings
many companies outsource parts of
Real-time editing of
their operations (manufacturing or
documents and projects
marketing, for example) and
frequently work with consultants,
experts, and auditors. In all cases,
there are challenges in bringing
people on- and off-site together in
collaborative efforts. The survey results identified the main issues companies are facing.
Thirty-two percent of respondents said their biggest roadblock to implementing collaboration was including
participants outside of the firewall. With more employees working remotely or on mobile devices outside of
the office and with the rise in the use of third-parties and contractors, you can understand why this issue
grabbed the top spot. Anyone who has tried to set up a collaborative session, be it a web conference or shared
document, has probably encountered problems where some participants could not join the session due to a
firewall blocking their access.
Another point highlighted in the survey results is that the increased mobility of today's workforce is
contributing to the challenges companies face with their collaborative efforts. About a quarter of the
respondents (24 percent) said that their biggest roadblock to implementing collaboration was the lack of
mobile device support for collaboration tools. This should not be a surprise. Many traditional collaborative
tools have feature-rich client software, which is operating-system dependent. With the wide variety of mobile
operating systems in use today, most collaborative-tool suppliers have simply not developed or ported their

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Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication: What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

offerings for all of the devices on the market. This is an area where Cloud-based collaborative services could
really help, as the use of tablets and smartphones for collaboration will only rise in the future.
The survey found other problems are preventing the wider scale use of collaboration solutions in some
companies. For example, 28 percent of the respondents said they need solutions that allow real-time editing of
documents. This, too, is an area where Cloud solutions can help. Cloud-based file sharing and web conferencing
solutions are making this process easier.
An additional 16 percent of the respondents said their biggest roadblock was addressing the challenges of
presence, messaging, and holding web meetings. Presence is especially important when holding ad-hoc
meetings or collaboration sessions where the need to locate participants (or their devices) may determine if a
meeting can or cannot be held in the first place.

Question 3: Which of these "social business" benefits is most important to your organization?
What's driving the need for
improved communication and
collaboration? That depends on
your organization. One way to look
at the issue is to understand the
benefits companies expect to
realize from becoming a more
social business.

15%

33%

Business agility to make

decisions faster

15%

Deeper customer
relationships
37%

Increased operational
effectiveness

As you might expect, many

Optimization of workforce
and HR
companies want to improve their
customer relationships. In today's
highly competitive business world,
customers have many choices and
can all too easily switch loyalties.
Companies realize they must do more than just resolve problems when they occur. Many companies want to
be more engaged with their customers, not just at the point of sale or when providing after-sales support. This
point was duly noted in the survey results. Thirty-seven percent of the respondents said the social business
benefit they wanted to realize is to have deeper customer relationships.
Others want to use improved communications and collaboration to increase operational efficiencies. That was
the choice of 33 percent of the respondents. Savvy businesses understand that making it easier for people to
share information and work together can eliminate duplication of efforts, accelerate completion of tasks, and
help groups develop and adopt best practices.
Two additional issues were identified in the survey. Fifteen percent of the respondents said they hoped that by
becoming a more social business, they could make decisions faster, which provides more business agility in

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Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication: What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

today's very dynamic business environment. Another 15 percent of the respondents said the benefit they were
looking for was a way to optimize their workforce.

Question 4: Which Cloud collaboration feature would be used most often by your users?
There is a growing need to
support collaboration to ensure
business success. As noted in
Question 2, implementing
collaborative solutions can be
challenging and there can be
obstacles to improving
collaborative efforts in an
organization. Cloud collaborative
services have the potential to
make new features easily
accessible to all users. But which
features are the most desired?

Brainstorming tools allowing

fast, ad-hoc meetings
19%

25%
Document sharing allowing
multiple simultaneous edits

26%
30%

Presence - knowing if
collaborators are available or
not
Secure messaging with
encryption for sensitive data

High on the list is document

sharing allowing multiple simultaneous edits. Thirty percent of respondents said this type of service would be
used most often by their workers. This makes perfect sense and gets to the heart of what collaboration means.
Many business processes are based on document processing. Invoicing, purchasing, and hiring all depend on
sharing documents. Most business processes produce numerous reports and status updates. All of these
documents must be shared and modified by all parties involved.
In a virtual tie at 26 percent and 25 percent, respectively, were presence and brainstorming tools. Presence is
critical with today's more geographically dispersed and more mobile workforce. People working on joint
projects need to know who is and is not available to participate when work must be done. Similarly,
brainstorming tools help bring people that are not in the same room together to solidify ideas, develop plans of
action, and resolve problems.
Finally, security was mentioned. Communication and collaboration solutions let people share company secrets,
confidential information, and personal data that must be kept private. As such, 19 percent of the respondents
said the most important feature they need is secure messaging with encryption for sensitive data.

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Cloud, Collaboration, and Communication: What's Top of IT Leaders' Minds?

Conclusion
Today's workforce is widely dispersed and more mobile than ever before. At the same time, decision making
and many work processes are increasingly collaborative activities. This means employees need robust
communication and collaboration solutions to conduct business and get their jobs done. The solutions must
support employee mobility. And they must allow a way to share information to bring business partners and
customers into the fold.
Increasingly, companies are looking for Cloud services to meet their business needs for communication and
collaboration. The reason: Cloud-based solutions have the potential to overcome many of the obstacles
mentioned above while delivering a number of benefits.
To find out how IBM Cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions can help you realize the benefits
of enhanced collaboration, visit us at www.ibm.com/social.

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