Each business function from marketing and communication to human resources and IT tends to have its own needs and specific use cases that need to be addressed by a digital workplace in order to improve communication and collaboration within and between different business functions.
In some of our previous blog posts, we covered the different ways that eXo Platform can tackle the challenges faced by such departments within your organization.
In this blog post we will dive more and more into the most common reasons why IT professionals said they chose eXo Platform and how it helps them perform more effectively and meet their organization’s objectives.
- An open source solution:
BYOT (Bring Your Own Things) and BYOA (Bring Your Own Application) trends have changed the role of IT departments from building, buying and assessing business solutions to a more strategic role of managing the business applications used by different departments to align with organizations’ overall digital transformation strategies.
The concern for IT professionals however is the nature of the solutions used internally as they vary from business-oriented solutions with advanced security compliance to even external social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
The open source nature of eXo Platform makes it an appealing solution for IT managers especially because it helps them tackle this challenge.
Implementing enterprise-ready open source technology helps in improving the ability of IT professionals within organizations to integrate business apps and 3rd party solutions.
This way they’re able to provide employees with their preferred tools all while having greater levels of control through advantages such as software source code auditability.
An open source solution is also appealing to IT managers because it helps to avoid vendor lock-in. Vendor lock-in is the dependency of an organization on one software vendor which makes it difficult to control and integrate with other apps and costly to switch to another vendor.
Being open and transparent, eXo Platform allows its clients to have great levels of control and flexibility over what they have in place. This proved to be an important criteria especially for governmental organizations.
- Control costs:
When adopting an intranet solution, IT teams often face the challenge of choosing high-performing solutions that respond effectively to recurrent challenges while respecting a predetermined budget.
The ability to choose to have eXo Platform deployed in the cloud or on-premise gives IT departments more flexibility depending on their needs and their existing IT setups.
Both deployment options have their own advantages. Cloud hosting helps IT teams cut down on the costs of hardware and infrastructure maintenance, as well the software maintenance (updates, patches, etc.).
On the other hand, on-premise hosting provides our clients with a way to have the solution and all of its data in their own private infrastructure in order to meet certain compliance requirements, have deeper control on the software, etc.
- IT compliance and security:
As an open source solution, eXo Platform allows IT professionals in certain organizations or activity sectors to audit the software whenever needed.
Having all of the business applications used by employees under one holistic platform solution and user experience also facilitates software governance and minimizes security risks associated with having employees use a multitude of apps and what is called “shadow IT”, which eventually leads to better compliance with security and governance policies.
- Externalized technical support and helpdesk:
eXo offers its clients different technical support options depending on their needs. For an IT team, having a responsive and effective support channel is crucial as it helps in resolving any potential issues related to the intranet software as well as in responding to recurrent questions. This is important when we consider the often business-critical nature of an active collaborative intranet platform.
- Consulting services:
From implementation and staff training to data migration and version upgrades, eXo provides its clients with a team of consultants to assist them throughout different phases of their projects. Consulting services can help IT teams gain an understanding themselves of the platform and make them better qualified to manage it and make the most out of it. This eventually contributes to a proper adoption of the solution and subsequently a more engaged workforce.
The IT department plays a vital role within organizations throughout every stage of a digital workplace implementation. It is responsible for identifying the needs of different departments, selecting the best suitable solution to satisfy these needs and work closely with software vendors to ensure good levels of adoption and user engagement with the platform.
