Technology has advanced almost every aspect of modern day life and has become second nature for those who use it. In today's world, consumers expect technology to provide seamless experiences for almost every situation. This especially holds true when it comes to workplace communication and collaboration tools.

A recent survey by Adobe analyzed today's workplace trends and found that 81% of the survey participants said "state of the art technology" was the top office perk. It's valid for workers — who are also everyday consumers — to expect the most of the workplace collaboration tools provided by their organization.

After all, it's the one place they are expected to be the most productive.

However, workplace tools don't always address the needs of each team across an organization. As a result, some teams take it upon themselves to download the applications they find to be most useful to work with — without consulting IT or organization decision makers.

The reality is, technology is no longer adopted or implemented from the top down — it's coming from the bottom up.

This is what's called "shadow IT" and a recent report found that 61% of companies are embracing it. It is the result of many things, but a huge factor that has led to this evolution is the fact that IT teams don't always have the resources they need to gain control over the technology being used by people in their organization.

It's almost impossible to keep up with all of the new devices and apps new generations of workers bring into the workplace. This makes it challenging to implement streamlined tools for enhancing business communications and collaboration without stifling IT innovation. Cloud communications can help overcome this problem in three key ways.  

Cloud technology can act as an extension of your team

Due to the lack of resources available to many IT teams, they rarely have the time to train employees on how to use new tools. The result? Teams end up only using a fraction of the available features, and missing the opportunity to increase efficiency or collaboration.

Cloud services can serve as an extension of IT teams because cloud vendors often lend their own support teams to train employees on their software, ultimately increasing their productivity and ability to innovate.

Additionally, the cloud does not require IT teams to rip out existing on-premises systems, so IT departments can approach the move to cloud responsibly. Organizations have the flexibility and freedom to do piecemeal deployments until they are able to make a full transition to the cloud.

The open cloud offers interoperability which increases collaboration across the organization

The lack of interoperability is a resounding problem for enterprise communications, and a constraint on collaboration. From Skype to Slack to HipChat to Hangouts — there are a number of team collaboration tools available, but they don't talk to each other.

The proliferation of these disparate collaboration tools has led to the creation of communications silos across the enterprise which ultimately hinder innovation. These silos create productivity walls and block insight that could change how companies do business.

The solution? IT teams can implement an open cloud to support true interoperability and integration into business applications and workflows. Open APIs are critical to enable integrations and connectivity to business workflows.

The cloud can increase innovation across lines of business

As more companies begin to realize what real-time analytics can do for decision making in their back-office applications, they begin to think about how powerful data-driven decisions could be if applied across all of their communications data.

For example, imagine how much value an organization could gain from integrating every communication event — including calls, instant messages, meeting records and call recordings — that a company has had with each of its customers into a single unified view.

These kind of insights could give sales teams the 360-degree view into a customer relationship that they need to close a sale or decide when an existing customer is ready to buy again.

Companies want to take relevant events and data from departments like sales, HR, finance and marketing and make it accessible across the enterprise. In turn, this helps employees make better decisions and increases productivity across teams and lines of business.

Cloud communications solutions can enable IT teams to connect the dots between different cloud ecosystems, driving more innovation across multiple lines of business.

IT teams play a critical role in driving innovation across their organization, but oftentimes they don't have the bandwidth or resources to implement the necessary tools to foster it. While the world of workplace communications continues to become more complex, it becomes all the more critical to seek out a unified approach.

The cloud is the only way to achieve this. Investing in the cloud is the most effective way to connect employees, customers and applications to encourage innovation and drive business growth.