CIOs: Unified communication and collaboration tools essential to digital transformation

Collaboration underpins digital transformation, say CIOs at Computing's IT Leaders Club

Unified communications and online collaboration tools are essential to digital transformation projects, according to CIOs at Computing's IT Leaders' Club event this week.

Because IT Leaders' Club events are held under Chatham House rules, the attendees cannot be directly quoted.

"We found that underwriters in Canada want to work with underwriters in the UK," said the CIO at an insurance company. "Obviously, their needs are focused around what needs to be delivered, but our challenge was how can we help them share best practice?"

There was, he adds, a real demand for Yammer when the organisation rolled it out, enabling like-minded, cross-border communities in the company to be formed.

Other organisations have rolled out Skype for Business, Slack, Jabber and Webex, while Microsoft Sharepoint remains a widely used underpinning of many organisation's collaborative infrastructures.

In the past, suggested the CIO at a fast-moving consumer goods products company, the organisation had rolled out tools to staff - but hadn't properly followed through. "We're guilty as a company of giving people tools and then doing nothing with them," he said. "We gave people Office 365 but not the training to use it," he added. "We haven't taken people through that learning process."

His organisation had implementing Microsoft Linq for communications, and followed that up recently by replacing it with Skype for Business as part of a ‘Connected Company Strategy', which had largely replaced telephone conferencing and even reduced the need for national and international travel, he claimed.

At the same time, his organisation was looking to re-invest what it saved in better computing devices, and computing devices that could better take advantage of this shift - such as Surface Pro 4s and Skype-enabled touchscreens.

Likewise, the CIO at a global engineering company suggested that a combination of Office 365, Salesforce Chattr, Banr and Webex had better enabled the company's science centre in India to work more closely with designers in the UK. Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), too, enables staff to take their desktops with them wherever they are.

The so-called "digital workplace" had started to redefine IT's interpretation of "the user", said Ben O'Reilly, head of managed infrastructure management at Fujitsu UK & Ireland. "Ten years ago we followed the devices. Now, the context needs to follow you."

That means that the office is really anywhere in which "the user" can be identified and the IT services they need to do their job delivered to them, regardless of their location.

The next Computing IT Leaders' Club is tonight at City Social at Tower 42 in London, with similar events planned in February and March. Membership is free to all qualifying IT leaders (CIOs, IT managers, IT directors and equivalent).