A new study by information management analysts AIIM, concludes that business leaders see collaboration as ‘crucial,’ but are confused by the rapid convergence of tools.

The study, ‘Content Collaboration and Processing in a Cloud and Mobile World’, found that  93 percent of business leaders believing internal collaboration is either crucial or very important to what they do, and 59 percent holding the same to be true of external collaboration.

Eighty-nine percent of respondents said that a formal collaboration system was a vital piece of infrastructure, yet 54 percent found the rapid convergence of collaboration and social tools to be very confusing. External collaboration was particularly problematic, with 71 percent feeling their organization has shortfalls in technical support for external and four in ten feeling strongly that external collaboration is badly supported.

“Most organizations now have a large ecosystem of collaborators, including external partners and third parties as well as internal staff,” said Doug Miles, Director Market Intelligence, AIIM. “But managing the tools required for such collaboration can be a challenge. While IT support for collaboration beyond the firewall has made great advances, organizations appear to be lacking in the support required to really reap the benefits of collaboration.”

The three biggest strategic drivers for improved collaboration were general productivity (47 percent), knowledge pooling (46 percent), and pulling together a dispersed workforce (36 percent). It was also seen as important to speeding up review processes, customer responses, and project completions.

The most important features to support collaboration, according to the research respondents, were sharing of documents (74 percent), workflows for comments and approvals (49 percent), and content access from mobile devices (37 percent).

Document and content sharing is highly likely to involve external collaborators beyond the firewall, yet traditional onsite systems are deliberately set up to be secured against access to those outside of the business. This means many users will turn to consumer cloud file-sharing services such as Dropbox, OneDrive, i-Cloud, Google Drive and YouSendIt.

Such consumer file-share and sync services are banned in more than half (56 percent) of organizations, with 27 percent actually restricting access. Only 23 percent currently provide an approved business grade alternative.

“The convenience and ease-of-use of consumer file-share and sync services make them very attractive for collaboration,” said Doug Miles, Director Market Intelligence, AIIM. “But such tools have security implications and organizations must look to provide flexible and easy-to-use collaboration functionality across the business if they really want to discourage use of consumer tools.”

The research for ‘Content Collaboration and Processing in a Cloud and Mobile World’ was underwritten in part by AvePoint, EMC, HP-Autonomy, Hyland, IntraLinks, Kofax, Seismic and Workshare.