Companies survive by deploying enterprise technology to improve the productivity, communication, and collaboration of their employees, BUT, there is a fast-growing concern for most companies — the fragmentation of the tools we use to get work done. At Snipply, we believe the future of collaboration is going to look very different.
New tools constantly enter a company’s software stack, yet few “talk” to one another to get work done. Fragmentation of software doesn’t allow employees to get things done. Employees (or end-users) are given a slew of technology options for them to utilize to be more efficient and produce better work in a shorter period of time.
Paul Miller, founder and CEO of Digital Workplace Group, suggested that though most organizations deploy a range of usable tools, they then “suffer from a level of digital fragmentation.” This includes famous “collaboration” software like Microsoft Teams and Slack. However, the variety of technology choices and their lack of integration creates noise for employees, confusion as to what tech to use, and creates more inefficiencies.
But what really is the downside to this fragmentation? How big a problem is it really? Well, it’s massive, and we go into a ton of detail here. In the meantime let’s take a look at the three biggest lies we’re told by the companies that make these tools.
The all-in-one solution never seems to work in practice.
The belief that a one-stop shop “intranet” would be best for the company. While an intranet does seem rational, in practice this has created additional steps in getting the information necessary to execute on work. Employees prefer getting to what they need as quickly and PAINLESSLY as possible. Often times, this is still just asking a colleague.
Companies keep trying to solve this problem the wrong way, by turning their product into a hub as opposed to a tool. You then just end up with an overwhelming amount of “hubs” acting as silos for the information you are looking for.
You can implement collaboration and productivity software top-down.
Software adoption often needs bottom-up input and support, and if you don’t already have champions on your team the implementation will fail.
Employees choose their tools. In the example laid out towards the beginning of the article, employees have preferences in which tools they like to work with. Forcing people out of their comfort zone, or trying to provide to meet the demand of every individual can obviously cause many problems if efficiency is the goal.
Some companies get this — for example, Dropbox states in their S-1 “Bottom-up adoption within organizations has been critical to our success as users increasingly choose their own tools at work. We generate over 90% of our revenue from self-serve channels”.
There are dozens of market forces contributing to this, making employee buy-in absolutely critical throughout the sales and implementation process. Demographics have shifted towards millennials, BYOD policies have become BYOA policies, consumer apps have become more sophisticated, teams are becoming more distributed, and freelancer coworkers are becoming more common. All of these trends point towards employee power in technology adoption increasing.
The complexity of software can make adoption daunting.
The simplicity of tools has disappeared. The idea used to be one tool for one problem, but by forgetting the end-user experience, enterprise software developers have added “functionalities” to their tools that cause confusion rather than improve the tool. Imagine a hammer that also acts as a screwdriver, scissors, tape dispenser, bottle opener, and printer. Can it even hammer anything anymore?
As development costs have gone down the past 10 years, the ease of adding functionality has increased. BUT, the ease of developing niche products that get their one function done easily and efficiently has increased as well. The best bet is to adopt these tools and establish processes for best practices.
The bottom line is while a lot of these PM and collaboration tools can be amazing, but companies adopting these tools are set up for failure from the very beginning because they aren’t utilizing bottom-up adoption which can inhibit implementation, they are trying to force an all-in-one solution instead of picking the best pieces of software for the tasks at hand, and they aren’t focused on simplicity and ease of use as opposed to the amount of total functionality.
Interested in learning more about application fragmentation? Make sure to check out our in-depth piece here, and see below to sign up for our waitlist.
Suffering from editor fragmentation and collaboration headaches resulting from it? Love using Excel but hate Sheets? Want to put an end to your team’s friction over Office and G Suite? Join our waitlist here.
