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WOBURN, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/30/13 -- Axceler®, a leader in enterprise collaboration governance, administration and migration solutions, today announced the results from its "SharePoint Governance Maturity Benchmark" survey, which finds that while businesses understand the value of SharePoint, a lack of governance is resulting in poor alignment with business goals, low user adoption and ultimately, reduced return on SharePoint investments.

Of the 1,000 SharePoint administrators and business professionals surveyed over the past year, although 67.2 percent said SharePoint governance is extremely or very important to their business, only 26 percent admitted to having a very well-defined governance strategy, with 51 percent admitting their business has not implemented any form of governance strategy. These results show a significant disconnect -- while businesses are embracing collaboration suites such as SharePoint within their organizations, there is confusion over who owns the management, compliance and end user success of these platforms.

Find out more in this infographic: Collaboration Tools Disconnected from Business Goals

When respondents were asked about the top challenges around managing SharePoint within their organization, managing security and permissions was named the number one challenge (60.8 percent), followed by managing content and information storage (51.3 percent) and not having enough time to manage the application (43.8 percent). Additionally, nearly half of the respondents (46.8 percent) said governance is not very or not at all defined within their organization and of those with a governance plan in place, only a third (33.5 percent) said there is a general awareness of the governance plan and ongoing strategy of how it will be managed.

The survey results also emphasized a widespread failure to align enterprise collaboration efforts with business objectives. Of the respondents, only 33.8 percent said their SharePoint plans directly connect with their business goals, with 60.5 percent stating their plans ranged from being neutral to not at all link to business objectives. Responses also showed organizations lost the opportunity to involve and engage end users in the governance process, with only 30 percent of companies connecting their governance plans with an end user adoption strategy well or extremely well.