IP Commercialization Firm, ITI Scotland, Improves Collaboration within Mobile Project Teams

ITI Scotland is a commercial organization focused on driving early stage innovation in digital media and communications, life sciences, and energy. To improve data centralization and project team collaboration, ITI Scotland deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint for its consultants, project teams, and stakeholders. With many of these professionals spending significant amounts of time outside the office each month, ITI Scotland needed an offline solution to increase productivity and ensure adoption of SharePoint. Adding Colligo Contributor Pro has enabled ITI Scotland to drive adoption of SharePoint and improve collaboration among mobile teams.

About ITI Scotland

Founded in 2003 by Scottish Enterprise, ITI Scotland Ltd. helps Scotland identify, create, and commercialize valuable technology-based intellectual assets. The company has three operating divisions known as ITI Techmedia, ITI Life Sciences, and ITI Energy. ITI Scotland bridges the gap between publicly funded early stage research, and privately backed commercial development. Its activities help stimulate and benefit the Scottish economy, contributing to a high-value knowledge economy over the long-term.

Application

ITI Scotland deployed Colligo Contributor Pro to extend the efficiency of its project teams, and to increase the adoption of SharePoint for enterprise content management.

Business Challenge

Effectively managing information is business-critical for ITI Scotland. The company has a significant number of research providers, commercial partners, external consultants, and three operating divisions. Its consultants and project teams develop research to accelerate the growth of intellectual property in Scotland. These projects rely on a high level of collaboration.

Due to intricate workflow requirements and the need to better share, store, and organize data among these project teams, ITI Scotland deployed SharePoint as its new content management platform. Tim Wright, Head of Knowledge Management & Information and Communication Technologies at ITI Scotland, explained: “We deployed SharePoint as our main collaborative environment because SharePoint provides a centralized, transparent, and easily accessible platform for our teams, project managers, and management to work effectively together on research projects.”

Yet with staff spending significant amounts of time outside the office each month, Wright found a great deal of sensitive information was still residing on laptops, never making it to company servers. “Our project teams and consultants spend up to three weeks outside the office every month, at client sites or traveling. With SharePoint, they needed to remember to copy files from the server to their laptops prior to going offline. As a result, they found it easier to simply work with files stored on their hard drives from the start,” said Wright.

Solution: Colligo Contributor Pro

ITI Scotland deployed Colligo Contributor Pro to provide project teams and consultants with offline access to SharePoint. Contributor’s ability to cache SharePoint locally means that all mobile professionals can access and update project information, including relevant emails.  They use Contributor when working from home, at client meetings, or while traveling by train between their Glasgow and Aberdeen offices (a three-hour ride). Changes made on laptops are synchronized automatically to SharePoint when the team members reestablish an Internet connection.

“We selected Colligo Contributor to increase the productivity of our project teams online and offline and, more importantly, to increase the adoption of SharePoint for document management,” said Wright. “Equipped with Colligo Contributor, our mobile professionals now have anytime access to their project files on their laptops. By making SharePoint content always accessible, Contributor has helped us increase the amount of centrally-managed content, driving the overall return on our SharePoint investment.”

By deploying a server-laptop replication solution, ITI Scotland has also been able to dramatically reduce the risk of data loss, theft, and corruption inherent with laptop-only data storage. Encryption of the local Contributor data store keeps intellectual property safe. With Contributor, if a laptop is lost or stolen, important information remains confidential. “This represents a huge win for ITI Scotland,” explained Wright. “More of our intellectual property is being centralized and backed up on SharePoint. This protects our intellectual property when laptops break or get lost.”

Contributor “very quickly met all the needs” of ITI Scotland, including synchronization of document libraries and lists, support for conflict resolution, and the ability to selectively synchronize portions of SharePoint sites.

When asked to comment on the return on his investment in Colligo Contributor, Wright said: “An ROI calculation was never required to purchase Colligo Contributor Pro. The cost was so marginal compared to benefits that it was really a no-brainer for ITI Scotland.”

Results

ITI Scotland has seen a significant increase in user adoption of SharePoint by using Colligo Contributor Pro. The company has been able to:

• Drive 100% adoption of SharePoint among project teams and consultants
• Increase the productivity of mobile workers with offline access to SharePoint content
• Facilitate centralized data management for project teams
• Reduce the risk of loss, theft, and data corruption of intellectual property
• Optimize the return on its SharePoint investment