Patches, quick fixes and workarounds, lifting the lid on Public Sector IT
Admit it, technology that empowers your employees can be a pain if you work in IT! The past decade has seen massive growth in the number of cloud services available, particularly for file sharing, storage and collaboration. This has been revolutionary for consumers. They get to back up their music to the cloud, access files across devices, and share photos with relatives across the globe.
But it’s also brought huge change to both public sector organisations and enterprises, as increasingly tech-literate (and, let’s face it, impatient) employees go rogue and find their own solutions to specific problems. They bring in their own apps and use them for work — things like file sharing, IM, social media and project management tools. It’s a familiar story.
Self-sufficient employees might lighten the load on the IT helpdesk in the short-term, but in Public Sector organisations it can be the stuff of nightmares — this is a data privacy and security headache that raises your vulnerability and opens you up to compromise. It’s hard enough to secure the organisation at the best of times. But with your workforce doing their own thing, the job gets a lot tougher.
The wide availability of sign-up-and-go cloud services means we’ve entered the age of the ‘IT Workaround’. This might suit individual employees for specific purposes, but it really doesn’t suit the IT Director. And in health or education, it can actually put the public at risk.
So, how do you take back control and give users what they want? The answer is to find your own secure, enterprise-grade cloud app that people want to use, then standardise it across the organisation.
With this in mind, look out for the following features:
Keep it friendly
The user interface has to be intuitive, and quick to learn. Employees, as well as private users, expect a user experience that’s enjoyable, easy and well-designed. Give them that in your file sharing, collaboration and communications apps, and you’re halfway there.
Consumer power
The days of clunky and rigid ERP and CRM systems are gone, and good riddance. These days, employees want functions that offer them ease of use. That means consumer-style sharing, collaboration and communication tools are the order of the day.
Take control
You need secure, centralised control that keeps citizens’ personal information safe. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to support a large workforce that uses loads of different consumer cloud platforms, even if they’ve decided to standardise en masse in a particular department. Your platform needs to give you centralised control.
Sync and share
Fast and efficient sync and share is essential if you’re scaling across a large workforce, collaborating on hundreds of documents. Workers want simple file sharing tools that are intuitive and easy-to-use. They also want their documents to be available where they want them, when they want them, and on their device of choice.
Workflow and metadata support
In the public sector, maximising efficiency is a priority. Ideally, your platform should include intuitive workflow and meta data support, to enable employees to be productive, efficient and in control. It needs to be easy to input tags and see who’s working on what. This is especially useful in departments like Communications and Marketing, where collaboration versioning is high.
Enterprise security
Naturally, you need your file and collaboration solution to be secure, which is the purpose of replacing employee-led cloud IT. (Box’s platform, for example, lets employees share files with a simple, secure link that can incorporate password protection, expiry dates or restricted download access. Also, IT can track activity on any user account or any file. This helps with compliance: auditing, tracking and securing information.)
Mobile image capture
Finally, mobile features such as mobile image capture can revolutionise processes for employees right across the organisation. If you can take a photo or capture text as an image, and transfer it automatically to a repository, you cut out layers of process. We’ve seen this kind of tech being used by the police force, the NHS and other public services.
You can also use mobile image capture for asset control or identification; quality control; and customer service. Or you can use it to digitise invoices, claims and reports. It’s a really attractive feature to offer your workforce, and they can find their own workarounds!
We’re living in the age of the workaround, with powerful cloud apps everywhere. But there are tools and platforms available to you, designed to solve the problems your people face every day. It’s possible to take control and give your users what they want at the same time, enabling them to be innovative, productive and efficient.
Watch here about how Box helped University of Dundee to share information securely across its internal, external and global user base. This interview touches on why CIO Paul Saunders chose to deploy Box across the University to both staff and students and its rapid adoption.
Justin List, Head of UK Public Sector
