By James Corbishley, Senior Technology Strategist, BitTitan
Over the last 18 months, the pandemic has shaken up business norms and revealed what’s possible in the workplace. Many employers have implemented remote work policies, and it appears that some form of the remote-work model is here to stay.
Remote working has permanently changed how employees collaborate. During the pandemic, many companies and employees quickly turned to workplace collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams to promote productivity and engagement. The power of Teams is evident in the surge of its adoption, up 900 percent in its first three years and, since then, achieving even more explosive growth. However, with the rapid mass adoption comes new challenges. A growing issue plagues many organizations – Microsoft Teams sprawl.
Also known as IT sprawl, Teams sprawl is the uncontrolled overflow of unused, outdated, or duplicated content within a Teams environment. This is often a result of a lack of governance within an organization on how employees should use technology or tools for collaboration. And with IT professionals also working remotely, it can become more challenging to govern the use of Teams among virtual employees. The issue of Teams sprawl has become a growing thorn in the side of those managing digital environments, highlighting challenges of when employees can’t interact in person.
Sprawl can be incredibly detrimental to enterprise organizations with complex internal structures and thousands of employees in different time zones. It can lead to confusion among end-users and ultimately create an environment of “content chaos,” where no one knows where to find the most current documentation, and so employees may in turn start to save their files on their personal drives again to retain ownership. When unmanaged, Teams sprawl can amplify miscommunication among employees and increase data security risks, as sprawl can potentially result in the wrong people accessing sensitive data if data remains unmanaged.
Teams sprawl can exacerbate during mergers or acquisitions, where organizations need to merge data under one umbrella. A lack of focused data consolidation and control during an M&A can make a complicated process even more so, resulting in disarray. Therefore, it’s imperative that businesses in these situations clean up their digital environments before combining them.
For any business looking to address data sprawl, the good news is that IT leaders can take proactive steps to prevent it from occurring. Outlined below are three ways IT leaders can curb Teams sprawl and streamline the exchange of data among remote employees:
- Establish internal stakeholders to own and manage sprawl. First, a larger plan for managing data is necessary, and internal stakeholders can help ensure users adhere to this plan. IT teams should create an internal group in charge of managing data sprawl and streamlining the use of Teams. This group will own the crafting, implementation, updating policies and best practices for using Teams. In addition, companies can assign each Teams channel an Admin or moderator who will manage it, ensuring people use it effectively and establishing rules for who can delete outdated or unnecessary content.
- Enable IT to monitor Teams activity. A business should empower IT to manage the Teams environment by giving them comprehensive visibility into user activity and usage trends, which will inform best practices. Also, by assigning channel creation to IT or specific business users, companies can curb the issue of single-use channels, which are not efficient. Creating a more structured process around new Teams’ channels helps establish a data record and reduces duplication and unnecessary data instances.
- Streamline migration complexities. Most IT professionals will agree that migrating instances of Teams is a complex process. To streamline the process, IT should establish a comprehensive migration plan to merge data between two or more Teams environments. And your plan should include a pre-migration audit to understand what data you’ll need to move, and to help you address any existing team and channel naming conflicts. Finally, you’ll want to make sure you are managing Team and channel memberships and permissions correctly and ensure a test phase is included during the migration process to ensure a positive user experience.
For many companies and employees, remote work is here to stay. And with that, IT professionals need to adjust accordingly as the digital landscape evolves. IT teams need to ensure effective management and governance of communication platforms for optimized collaboration and engagement. With employees located in different locations, access to data is critical. Thoughtful planning and data governance of Teams environments will help organizations operate efficiently and avoid the dreaded content chaos
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Corbishley is senior technology strategist for BitTitan, where he works with product, sales and development teams for MigrationWiz, the company’s leading SaaS solution for cloud migration. A veteran of the IT services industry, James specializes in enterprise software and systems, Microsoft messaging and collaboration solutions, enterprise architecture, and cloud adoption.
