Wednesday, July 18th, 2007

When Top-Down Meets Bottom-Up

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In the happy mainframe era (80′s), one question in the enterprise was “Should we use PCs in the office?”. The same problem happened in the 90′s with the transformations linked to the adoption of the Internet. In both cases, CIOs could not stem the tide: employees would naturally bring new technologies they used at home to the office… In the end, the question was not “Should we implement these new tools?, but rather “How can we adopt changes that our employees are bringing anyway, while making sure our systems and data are safe?”. And it’s the same today with wikis, blogs, and other web based tools such as Box.

If you visit our site frequently you probably noticed an “Enterprise” section on our home page. Many of you use Box for personal needs. But a large portion of you use Box to be more efficient at work, whether that is a home businesses (architects, marketing, PR agencies, consultants…) or a large corporation. From your feedback, Box has been very successful at solving the problems of single employees needing to access files from anywhere, exchange large files, or quickly set up collaborative workgroups. Also, distributed teams tell us Box makes it easy to set up a space to collaborate on files with clients, partners, contractors and any other actors involved in the extended enterprise. We are seeing users making our service part of their working tools to be more productive in their daily operations, advocating our service in their companies, and converting other employees to the Box cause…

However, until we introduced Box Enterprise, our bottom-up approach (where the base of the corporate pyramid is pushing our service within the company) had its own limits. While employees were happily finding a simple way to collaborate with people outside of their firewall, the IT department had its own concerns. IT’s role is to ensure that the company’s “digital assets” are safe, that the tools their employees use are aligned with the company policies, and that the IT tools in place make employees more efficient in their day to day job. If you work at a large company you probably know what kind of friction can happen, right? So we saw the need to provide the IT department with an easy way to deploy Box and have an overview of what employees do on the network, while continuing to offer a flexible and easy to use solution for the end-user. This is what we included in the Enterprise package. This will hopefully contribute to mid and large size companies adopting Box with a top-down approach, helping both their employees and the organization – Top-down meets bottom-up.

And you? Do you see your company benefiting from Box? Do you have stories about your company adopting Web 2.0 tools? We’re curious to know what you think about our approach…

(Thanks Randal for your contribution)

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