How to Cut Down Enterprise Conferencing Chaos
With cloud offerings, It’s really easy for anyone to log onto a website, put in your company credit card details and have a new service up and running in a matter of minutes. It’s also really easy to have six different departments in six different silos installing six different tools within six hours of one another. Maybe they’ll tell IT about it. Or maybe they’ll go rogue. Meanwhile, IT has been vetting vendors for security, reliability and network compatibility and has a completely separate stack of supported technologies. Let the chaos begin.
In our recent webinar How to Cut Down Enterprise Conferencing Chaos, we dig into the results we got from surveying IT pros in the Spiceworks community and delve deep into the factors that drive conferencing chaos and the impact that an IT-influenced communications strategy can have on the overall efficiency and productivity of a communication/collaboration solution.
So how did we even get ourselves into these chaotic environments, and more importantly, how do we get out? Oftentimes these custom-built communication technology stacks are assembled out of haste rather than choice, and as the list of disparate applications pile up, so do the support tickets and maintenance contracts. With these hand-crafted communication clusters leaving only 35% of survey respondents satisfied, it’s easy to question whether utilizing multiple platforms is the best and most efficient method to address the madness.
According to our survey, the top three reasons companies use so many applications are to achieve system compatibility, accommodate regional differences and meet user preference. When end users find barriers to communication, they seldom look to IT for guidance and instead take matters into their own hands, especially in regions where there isn’t an IT staff physically in the office.
And while these users go out and purchase their own platforms to solve their own issues, they also unknowingly trigger multiple issues for their beloved IT admins. Not only does IT have to keep track of who uses what platform, they also need to learn how to troubleshoot and patch individual programs and identify the hidden costs and fees that are bundled in.
But just as there’s only a rainbow after the rain, there’s a silver lining to the (technological) cloud of a bad communication experience. We are able to learn from bad experiences and better identify the speed bumps the organization faces, which provides good direction when evaluating solutions in the future.
Learn from the mistakes of the IT pros before you and check out our new white paper, Finding Your Way Out of Conferencing Chaos. Download the full report to learn the key features that IT pros consider when evaluating collaboration solutions and the hidden pitfalls to avoid.