Digital workplace and enterprise collaboration tool implementations tend to fail a lot. Centralized collaboration models that have no strategy, have a lack of support or are poorly adopted, often form the reason for such collaboration failures. When users cannot get a collaboration platform, such as Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint, etc working properly, they would normally do the best they can to work around these. Moving from your centralized model to a decentralized one is one way to providing users with the features they need while making them work more responsibly as well.
Collaboration Platforms Are Not an IT Priority
Having Microsoft Teams or SharePoint in place almost completely fulfills the requirement in some corporate set-ups, and that is it. Then, the IT department proceeds to the subsequent project, and the quality of care and maintenance of the established collaboration platform is basically allowed to drop. This results in a situation where user-complaints are often ignored. Those concerns remain with the internal platform, and users do what it takes to work around this and get their assignments completed.
For instance, a technical writer can come across missing SharePoint features which they require to make a team site. At times, calls to the IT department get the user the required permissions to enable those missing features. Occasionally, though, the IT people would just ignore that side of things because they are busy setting up something else.
Partners, Contractors, and Freelancers are Part of the DNA of Your of Project Team
If contractors, partners, and freelance workers are part of the way your business works on projects, a decentralized collaboration model would likely be a good thing for your organization. That is because this model offers the added flexibility which you require to get access to your non-employees. Banking on IT people to manage access for third-party users can prove time-consuming, which means that platform access comes through by the time your project finally winds down.
A decentralized model is required to open up access to your collaboration platform to external parties. In the present age of compliance, the model option remains one where you may require ongoing support just to make sure of security and compliance. It is important to form corporate policies as well as training strategies for teams that might just be opening collaboration sites to those parties.
Shadow IT and BYO IT Schemes Are in Place
If you already have your own shadow and BYO IT schemes in place, then the time is ripe to switch to a decentralized model. If these are already part of your corporate culture, it is best that you make your move without losing any more time. Shadow and BYO IT suggest that your users have the keys by now, so enabling them to handle their work collaboration applications is usually a no-brainer.
