| | July 20159CIORevieweasy when a geographic location or work group has 90 percent of its workers using one solution, but when the numbers come in around 25 percent, it must be reevaluated. IT must find the best candidates for integration and offer solutions to fit their needs.Analyze--Start crunching the numbers. It might seem beneficial to support just one standard, but at what cost? Not all companies can afford to completely scrap hardware or vendor contracts to support one standard. While some cloud advocates may encourage 100 percent cloud adoption, other companies have compliance, security and legacy requirements that might suggest a hybrid approach is the better way to go. Calculating productivity costs or opportunities for a number of employees and locations may be difficult, but is critical to equation. Don't forget to pull in the financial analysts to help. They can also determine write off issues or advantages and find other hidden cost factors that should be addressed.Streamline--Not unlike the decision to buy a new car, do you go with the latest electric technology or stick with a cheaper, more traditional car that uses gas? Depending on the consumer's usage model, they might worry about time involved charging the car during long trips or getting stuck on the road. Yet, a high mileage driver might still want better gas mileage. A hybrid wins out - despite newer technology. We often offer two, even three, enterprise-class choices to users within the company and help them interconnect. But after that, it's our job to know when to say "no." There's no substitute for security and reliability. Integrate--Integration comprises a few things here. First, there is the seam-less operation needed. People notice this most when they try to do something simple, such as go to make a cal-endar invite and realize they can't view the other person's avail-ability. Patches must be designed for true compatibility, not only with multiple software offerings, operating systems or applications, but also specific to your own net-work and security. Security is top of mind these days, and we must keep our intellectual property secure and vital informa-tion private. We have Boards of Direc-tors, as well as customers, who ultimately rely on not only our productivity, but also that our processes are executed securely and in compliance.Expert Online--Once rolled out, today's knowledge worker would often rather seek an expert online, perhaps turning to the internet or social media for online resources, rather than fill out an IT ticket. With the many variances in today's workplace, there just isn't enough IT resource to go around for real-time support. But the more knowledge bases, chat or other enterprise support services that can be offered online, the quicker and more accurate the information is for the worker. Knowledge bases from the enterprise offer a more specific, reliable and secure solution.Re-evaluate--I'm a big proponent of establishing baselines and creating elec-tronic dashboards. Set your alarms and watch them; then re-establish your baseline after normalization. But, as we all know, we're never really done. So it's important to constantly re-evaluate, monitor and assess the effectiveness of the rollout as well as identify that next challenge or "opportunity" to help support and boost knowl-edge worker productivity.By following the easier, more collaborative path, we can strive to offer the right balance of tools to sup-port the knowledge worker and seamless collaboration, while avoiding potential threats that arise from communications silos. Make sure you understand the tradeoffs of critical decision criteria such as suite versus best-of-breed and on-premises versus cloud. Failure to do so could result in costly technology rip-and-replace projects later or unmet business objectives"Avoiding Communication SilosEvalute Analyze Streamline Integrate Expert Online Re-evaluate
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