How to Balance User Adoption With Security in Your Collaboration Project
Imagine that you’ve been asked to help plan the new children’s science center in your city. You are thrilled to be part of it because of how this new facility will enable your kids to collaborate, interact and learn. However, because of government regulation and concerns for the children’s welfare, when the facility opens there is heavy security around the place; everyone gets searched before they can enter.
Big lineups appear, there are restrictions on who can experience which exhibits, and hours of operation are very limited. After an initial high response, participation in the science center dwindles and fails.
Enterprise Collaboration Faces the Same Dilemma
This is a nightmare scenario, yet this happens in enterprise content management and collaboration projects. The initial intention is good: move unstructured content off file shares, out of inboxes and off hard drives into a centrally managed service, integrate it with enterprise systems and provide a rich environment for sharing content. However, because of concerns around risk, compliance and governance, the user experience gets eroded to the point that no one wants to use it. All too often, the whole thing gets scrapped.
There’s no doubt about the benefits of enterprise collaboration – if it works well. An October 2013 Aberdeen study of 126 organizations (“Enterprise Social Collaboration: The Collaborators Advantage”) found that respondents who identified social business collaboration as their top business goal saw significant improvement, as compared to those organizations that did not prioritize it.
Collaborative Organizations Succeed
The study showed that collaborative organizations enjoy improvements in customer retention, employee productivity, employee satisfaction, sales cycle reduction and operational efficiency. This was reflected in year-over-year performance changes such as 55% greater increase in annual company revenue. This goes to show, there are compelling reasons for companies to provide their employees with effective collaboration tools, and often these are integrated into enterprise collaboration (ECM) platforms such as Microsoft SharePoint and Office 365.
Successful collaboration and content management projects require high user adoption because the content that is being captured and shared is generated and consumed by the employees themselves. Successful collaboration and content management projects, therefore, must get a high degree of user buy-in. Easy access to content whether the user is in the office, offline or on a mobile device is the top priority.
SharePoint User Adoption Still a Major Stumbling Block
Poor adoption by end users is still a huge concern in implementing ECM projects. A recent 2015 AIIM Industry Watch Report sponsored by Colligo entitled “Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint – Important Strategy Choices” highlighted that only 11% agreed with the statement “We have achieved all we planned and it is a success.” In fact, according to the study, 63% of SharePoint deployments are stalled or struggling to meet expectations.
When asked why their SharePoint projects were stalled or failed, respondents to the AIIM study cited several reasons and among the top was: “Users never really liked it or found it hard to use." Only 25% agreed with the statement “We have a good level of adoption and users like it.”
What Goes Wrong?
What’s getting in the way of user adoption? Often it is the degraded user experience as organizations need to apply necessary controls and restrictions for governance and security requirements. Some examples are:
- Management of legal risk, which includes controls around data leakage but also management of stranded information that can become a problem in an e-discovery situation. Some form of control must be exercised over the content being shared, particularly regarding what is sent to mobile devices, which are notoriously unsecure if not managed carefully. This makes it hard for users to move content between each other and between systems.
- Encryption and authentication technologies generally need to be employed to reduce the threat of data loss and hacking. This can be confusing to the user, particularly if they have to remember multiple passwords and periodically re-authenticate.
- In some industries governance and/or compliance are critical. This can include regulatory compliance such as HIPAA and SOX and rules surrounding the archival of all messages. Records management systems often require users to apply metadata to content that is being stored and that places an unacceptable burden on the end user.
Business Users Expect a Simple and Intuitive Experience
Users expect their business tools to make them more effective. When they use a new tool they ask “What’s in it for me?” If the user experience is poor, they quickly lose interest and find another way to do their work.
In fact, this has been the reason that file sharing tools, like Dropbox, are making their way into large organizations – whether IT likes it or not. These tools are designed specifically to make it easy for users to share information without the annoyance of enterprise controls.
And there’s the dichotomy: on the one hand, organizations need to gain high user adoption to achieve the benefits of improved collaboration and on the other hand, they need to secure and manage information in an era of growing threats.
How to Solve the User Adoption Challenge
Fortunately tools and techniques are emerging to help with this. Below are five things to think about when developing an enterprise collaboration solution that adheres to the security and governance requirements of your organization:
- Clearly lay out the goals (KPIs) for performance improvements the business expects to achieve with the new collaboration system. Success will require that users adopt it; so setting an up-front goal for the level of user adoption is critical. This will also help to guide design tradeoffs later.
- Get buy-in from senior management, and ensure they are vocal about it. Collaboration projects are about changing the way people work. Change management is hard and users won’t do it unless they have strong leadership.
- Design mobility in from the beginning, not as an afterthought. With careful planning, mobile tools can provide the expected productivity gains while being secure.
- Design information governance policies into the solution up-front. Consider using tools that can help users adhere to governance policies. If records management is a requirement, for example, choose a solution that makes the application of metadata easy. Users will do the right thing if it’s easy to do.
- Choose a platform that helps IT to effectively target and monitor usage of content, on mobile devices and desktops alike. This will provide much needed user adoption data, enabling you to balance the user experience with security.
Modern enterprise collaboration and ECM tools are capable of delivering high impact to an organization, but the user experience needs to be carefully managed to gain the benefits. To succeed, user experience (UX) needs to be top of the list of any planned ECM implementation, or the initial excitement around, and high response to, the new system will dwindle quickly and it’ll fail.
Fortunately there are strategies that can be employed to simultaneously deliver high impact with low risk, ensuring that your collaboration project is a resounding success.
Barry Jinks is CEO of Colligo, a leading provider of data synchronization solutions for Microsoft SharePoint, Office 365 and OneDrive for Business.
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