Collaboration software company Asana Inc. is trying to eliminate what it says are countless working hours wasted on tasks such as searching for information, switching between applications and regular status meetings that achieve nothing in terms of productivity.

Asana refers to the time employees waste on the mundane tasks listed above as “work about work.” It worries that these chores become a real problem as enterprises grow, with organizations of 5,000 employees and up typically losing as much as 63% of their time on them.

“Enterprises today are organized functionally but the reality is that work happens cross-functionally,” said Asana Chief Operating Officer Anne Raimondi. “The misalignment between how teams are organized and how work actually gets done is fueling work about work across organizations.”

So Asana is announcing a major update to its work management platform that’s used by teams to organize tasks in a centralized visual dashboard to improve coordination among workers. The new features in Asana Enterprise Work Graph, announced at Asana’s Scale Enterprise Summit today, are meant to solve the challenges enterprises face around “cross-team coordination” by providing team members with more clarity around the projects they’re working on. By doing so, it can help to massively reduce the time people spend on “work about work,” it says.

One of the key elements of Asana Enterprise Work Graph is Asana Goals, which helps keep teams aligned with the organization’s overall goals. Today it’s getting a new application programming interface that helps connect team goals with data and insights from core business applications.

The idea is that this can help to monitor impact and inform executive decision. With the new Goals API, companies will benefit from a more holistic view with all of their goals in one place, plus automatic progress reports and the ability to change those goals using any tool.

For example, the company expained, by linking an Asana goal to a customer relationship management tool report, when sales teams close opportunities the goal will automatically update in Asana to keep everyone involved across an organization informed.

Those custom integrations are available now, Asana said, while the automatic progress updates in Goals will arrive in the platform via an update coming soon.

A second update pertains to Asana’s Workflow Builder tool, which is a point-and-click tool that makes it easy for employees to create visual workflows without any coding. The forthcoming Workflow Builder and Library will make it possible to create and reuse pre-built workflows across an organization, so they can quickly be added to new projects.

Meanwhile, Asana’s Universal Reporting tool, which is designed to eliminate the need for regular progress meetings, gains new reporting and analytics capabilities around data trends and workflows. So the tool can now be used to track budget spend across a specific project over a period of days, weeks or months, for example, or to analyze the amount of time a team is losing due to inefficient processes, Asana said.

On the security side, Asana is helping organizations keep their data more secure with a new tool called Admin Announcements, available now. Information technology teams can keep the entire organization updated through Asana, and send specific information to the right teams as required.

Asana is also planning to debut a new Enterprise Key Management tool that will enable companies to bring their own security keys to encrypt data. Coming soon, EKM will ensure companies have more control over their information, meaning Asana can be used with more sensitive, mission-critical data.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that the future of work is changing faster than ever as enterprises pivot their value creation in today’s coronavirus pandemic-influenced world.

“Anything that can help to make enterprise workers more productive is highly welcome, so under these conditions Asana’s continued innovation is more than welcome,” Mueller said. “We’ll have to wait and see what the real impact of these updates will be, but it’s always good to see more innovation.”

Today’s platform updates come as Asana announced its expanding its ecosystem of Asana Partners, which are third-party software providers who integrate with Asana to provide features around security, identity, compliance, software-as-a-service management and more.

The Asana platform integrates with more than 200 third-party tools and it’s adding dozens of new partners today. They include Splunk Inc., whose security information and event management or SIEM tools now integrate with Asana’s Audit Log API. A second new partner is Netskope Inc., which is integrating with Asana to provide new cloud access security broker capabilities that can help to enforce security policies, identify and manage sensitive data and prevent information from being shared outside of a company’s environment.

Images: Asana