Effective file sharing is a necessity in knowledge-intensive organizations. Document-centric team collaboration is required for producing a variety of outputs, including internal-facing planning documents and external-facing deliverables. Teams need adequate tools to collaborate around work-related documents. Despite the need for effective document collaboration in the enterprise, many organizations are failing to provide their employees with the right tools to get the job done. The result is that knowledge workers are looking outside of the enterprise for solutions. Collaboration platforms (e.g. Microsoft SharePoint) offer content repositories for working with documents, but many IT departments have set these tools up in a restrictive, cumbersome and unintuitive manner. Today’s knowledge worker wants platformagnostic, on-demand access to their files whenever and wherever they need them… and they’ll bring this functionality into the organization whether IT approves of it or not. Employees are bridging the established enterprise infrastructure into their preferred work environment using solutions that corporate IT departments do not, cannot, or only slowly approve of. In short, knowledge workers are willing to look at tools outside the paradigm offered by corporate IT to meet their needs.
