If You Want Better Compliance, Focus On Collaboration

Ensuring Both with Cloud Enterprise Content Services

For many years, there has been a fear among IT professionals that the user freedom and empowerment offered by collaborative systems would make it difficult to adhere to processes and enforce compliance standards. However, in today’s digital world, enterprises need both compliance and collaboration to thrive. Stéphane Donzé, CEO of AODocs discusses a solution.

Compliance and collaboration have long been seen as irreconcilable within enterprises. Why? IT departments often impose monolithic systems that have been traditionally seen as the most “secure” for their users with the expectation that they will provide the best enterprise security and compliance. Employees, on the other hand, thrive when using collaborative, user-friendly tools that help them do their jobs most efficiently. There has been a longstanding fear amongst some IT professionals that the user freedom and empowerment that collaborative systems emphasize would make it difficult to adhere to processes and enforce compliance standards. And the continued use of these clunky compliance-focused systems exacerbates the problem by further siloing information and limiting collaboration. It’s a vicious cycle.

In today’s digital world, enterprises need both compliance and collaboration to thrive. It’s quite logical, really. Compliance is all about documentation, and good documentation requires collaboration. Most enterprise compliance requirements revolve around controlling a document’s life cycle – how content is validated, distributed to end users and retained – and having the ability to audit everything that happens to it. This life cycle begins with the authoring phase, a phase in which collaboration is crucial. In order to create a document with valuable content, people must be able to work together and exchange ideas. This can only happen with collaboration-centric systems like Google. G Suite, for example, brings people and information together with apps like Gmail, Docs, Drive and Hangouts Meet & Chat, simplifying collaboration and transforming how work gets done.

Collaboration Drives Proper Documentation

Collaboration can, and most definitely should, be cross-departmental. Moreover, it is becoming more than just cross-departmental. The presence of the “extended enterprise,” remote employees and partners upon whom a company is dependent to succeed, continues to grow. In order to make this vital and extensive collaboration compliant, everything must be in the public cloud. The public cloud provides a suite of business tools with all the right security protocols and real-time collaboration capabilities.

Any company, from small startups to multinational enterprises, can easily get up and running on the public cloud with the expectation that their files and intellectual property will be protected by an extensive team of security experts.

Ensuring Compliance in the Extended Enterprise

But how do you ensure compliance? Simple. Bake compliance into your collaboration systems with the right content services platform. Unfortunately, most solutions on the market aren’t keeping pace with the growing cultural shift in the workplace that is centered on improving collaboration, efficiency and user experience. This is where cloud native content services platforms come in.

The right platform, if well-integrated within cloud collaboration tools where end users spend most of their time, allows for transparent compliance and intuitive collaboration. All of the content that is produced during the collaboration phase is properly captured, ensuring traceability and proper retention processes.

A cloud content services platform takes control of document validation, publication, retention and other document control processes, including change requests and version control. Companies remain secure and compliant while users get agile, easy-to-use tools that allow for optimal collaboration. Employees across all parts of departments can make their processes more secure and efficient, from automating invoice processing to streamlining employee onboarding, reducing the time and effort needed to prepare and conduct audits, improving quality control and operating procedures and applying document retention policies. Thanks to these advances in cloud content service platforms, companies can now have their cake and eat it too.