Your collaborative business offer vs. Shadow IT — Facts !

Fact 1 — Facebook, Whatsapp and Doodle, are the Shadow IT leaders

Question asked : In your daily work, do you use these public tools ?

Why does it matters (for you as a member of the digital team)? Your colleagues don’t wait to have the right tools to work efficiently, regardless of the security, the transparency, the control, and your digital strategy.

What can you do? Be thankful to your colleagues. Shadow IT highlights the needs for collaboration changes. The more your colleagues want to change, the more you have the opportunity to promote new collaboration practices. Forbidding shadow IT is not the best way to reduce it. Accepting it as an “alternative IT”, and developing your business offer is more efficient.

Fact 2 — Using or not using our personal phone at work is an individual choice, regardless of the company policy

Questions asked: Do you use your personal phone at work? Does your company have a “bring your own device” policy?

Why does it matters? Using a personal mobile phone to work can involve cultural issues, as the fear to work on off hours, or the weekend, mix private and professional data.

What can you do? Allowing or forbidding BYOD policies is not a solution. You have to promote new ways of working, including guidelines about working hours, confidentiality. Cloud and permanent access to information come with new rules and new individual responsibilities.

Fact 3 — Mail is still the main collaboration tool

Question asked: What sort of “collaborative solutions” do you use at work?

Why does it matters? Mail is not a new way of working, and we receive so much mails, please stop.

What can you do? Stop banning the mail, it is an excellent tool… in order to engage conversations, to have external discussions (B2C, B2B), to make an official decision. For any other need, think about the best way to collaborate, and promote it.

Fact 4 — Employees collaborate with their local team first

Question asked: In your work, what are your main needs in terms of collaboration?

Why does it matters? From our perspective, your colleagues are mainly interested in individual usages with short term benefits. Extending to transversal usages with long term benefits (such as cross entity best practices sharing or knowledge management) is a harder task to manage.

What can you do? Deploy and promote main needs first, to get quick success before going further.

Where does our data come from?

The Lecko-YouGov study was conducted with 1,009 employees working in French companies with over 5,000 employees. An online poll was conducted, on the YouGov France panel of owners, according to the quota method, from December 1 to December 8, 2017. The panel is representative of the participants’ age, level of supervision, region, and socio-professional category. 22% of the employees on the panel are top and middle managers. Employees are deskless and knowledge workers.

Do you want more? Read the complete study

This article is an extract of Lecko’s guide to businesses’ internal digital transformation. Our vision of the collaboration has been built over our 10 years experience of providing support to large organizations. That made us build a strong expertise on this topic. This new volume (#10!!) complements and encompasses the insights from the previous editions in order to provide you with a 360° view. We released it Q1 2018 and had the opportunity to host a keynote event in our offices, with 100+ participants.

You can download the study (for free) by clicking here.