Social Networking in Business

Here is a very good presentation on Enterprise 2.0 in a long time...

AIIM New England Social Networking Presentation

View more presentations from Doug Cornelius.

Sharepoint Implementation - Success Factors

Here is a video (at the end of this post) that dramatizes Sharepoint project failures and what is needed for a successful implementation of Sharepoint.

But wait a minute.  The remedies sound too familiar:

a) Clear business objectives

b) Identify critical success factors

c) Prioritize - don't do everything at once

d) Initially, Pick high visibility projects - low hanging fruits - ensure buy in

e) Plan roll out strategies

As CIO, you would wonder how the context changes but the advise from IT consulting fraternity remains the same.

So, are the stick-to-the-basics advisors being too simplistic?  Or are these principles so deceptive in their simplicity that we miss them often?  My guess is both these scenarios are true.

I believe there are a few additional drivers of success for such projects:

a) Avoid believing all the marketing hype surrounding Sharepoint.  While it is indeed a powerful platform and can do a lot of things, it is equally important for you to know what it CANNOT do for you.

b) Sharepoint is not an "application" with a set of "features".  Focus on the specific business issues that you wish to resolve and how Sharepoint can help you solve these issues.

c) Avoid "sharepoint developer = asp.net developer" syndrome.  (This is also covered in the embedded video).  We have been surprised to find implementations by even some very prominent clients suffering from this syndrome.  A sharepoint developer needs to have deep understanding of asp.net framework and coding.  However, this is only a "necessary" condition; not a "sufficient" condition for a good sharepoint developer.  The costs and risks associated with this approach are too high.  Ensure your implementation partner has an in-depth expertise and resorts to customization only where it is needed.

d) Ensure a realistic understanding of time and effort involved.  It is relatively easy and quick to implement the capabilities relating to communication, content management, collaboration and search.  However, enabling workflows, business process integration, dashboards and business intellegence capabilities requires much greater effort (involving typical SDLC stages).  It is necessary to decide on your project's phasing and budget accordingly.

e) In most cases, Sharepoint is but a small part of a larger enterprise-wide initiative.  It cannot be driven by the IT department alone.   Sharepoint based intranets, self service portals, dashboards would touch almost all your employees.  Also, the volume of content to be managed (and the pace at which it grows) is often overwhelming.  It is, therefore, important to decentralize responsibilities to other concerned departments.   Concurrent initiatives in terms of communication and change management are equally important to ensure the success of the project. 

f) If you are looking to "integrate" sharepoint with any of your existing technologies, e.g. a document management system; take care to ensure the concerned technology vendor gives you "demonstrated evidence" of feasibility of its integration with Sharepoint.  As such, MOSS 2007 has a decent document & content management capability.  The need for an advanced system should arise only in exceptional cases where advanced capabilities are needed.  In all such cases, it is important to go beyond the "promise of seemlessness" offered by the marketing team of the vendor.

As always, I look forward your views on the above obsevations; and if you would like to share similar thoughts and experiences.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM) - Present & Future

Though this presentation is a year old, one can bet it is equally (or probably even more) relevant.  Coming from AIIM, and based on its 2008 annual industry survey; here are some interesting findings:

a) While 88% respondents treat managing of their organization's electronic information as important/very important / extremely important; only 25% of them had ever heard of the term ECM.

b) 33% of the respondents had implemented MOSS 2007 (remember it was only a year old in 2008)

c) Among the respondents planning on implementing MOSS 2007; collaboration was the most dominant need; followed by content management (document/records/WCM) followed by search and business intelligence.

d) An interesting insight : It costs $0.20 to buy 1 GB of storage but $3,500 to review 1 GB of storage!

e) Don't miss those awesome pictures with scanners nicely finding their natural place in each of them!

Sharepoint in plain english

Ah! Finally a video that cuts the jargon and explains the benefits of sharepoint as a collaboration tool.  Wish similar ones are published soon, explaining other benefits of sharepoints, i.e. as content management, search, business process integration, business intelligence, etc.



You may also download this video.

Sharepoint Elevator pitch … anyone?

“So, what is sharepoint?” This is the toughest ever question you can ask a sharepoint expert! You are sure to invite a long unwinding answer that talks about portals, content management, document management, collaboration, learning, intranet, extranet, websites, workflows, business process integration, dashboards, social networking, enterprise search, …. PHEW!

Indeed, Sharepoint is difficult to describe and position as precisely as your other investments, e.g. ERP, CRM or even some of infrastructure investments such as operating system or virtualization. It is possible to describe the business value offered and to calculate tangible returns on these investments.

I remember, a decade ago, an ERP investment too was justified more on “strategic” grounds than in terms of its tangible benefits. The benefits of “business processes integration” which are so obvious now; were difficult to visualize and quantify.

In case of Sharepoint, the task is even more challenging – not only because of it is new and difficult to visualize; but also because it deals with “unstructured” data. You are not dealing with purchase or sales transactions (which you can quantify). Rather you are dealing with elusive benefits of “collaboration”, “information sharing”, “networking”, and so on.

Further, there are no alternate technologies that you can compare Sharepoint with! There is simply no other technology that covers the spectrum of capabilities that Sharepoint does. While it reflects strongly of Sharepoint, this does not make it easy to position it in the minds of a decision maker. In fact a couple of offerings are beginning to emerge that position themselves as “alternative to sharepoint”!

It is, therefore, not surprising to find the question “What is Sharepoint” being answered in terms of “What it does”. It is also not surprising to find the justification for Sharepoint coming in the form of the argument that it is Microsoft’s most successful technology in recent times; having exceeded sales of US $ 1 billion in FY 2008; and going strong even in recessionary times. The implication is that if so many companies are investing in Sharepoint, surely it must be worth it! Another implication is that if you are not thinking of sharepoint, you may be missing the bus.

Unfortunately, these are not the arguments you can use to obtain an approval for investment into Sharepoint. Also, these arguments do not provide you any framework for subsequently measuring the success of your decision.

So what should you do? How do you build a business case for sharepoint?

IMHO, the answer lies in your own peculiar business needs. Instead of focussing on all the fancy things Sharepoint can do, you need to zero down on the specific business challenges you would like Sharepoint to address for you. (Of course, this requires you to have an overview understanding of what Sharepoint can do). Once you have created a list of these challenges and you get down to comparing Sharepoint vis-à-vis any other alternative(s), the answers would be obvious to you.

Lets take the example of an organization that had requested for our advice. Being a large, diversified business house; the organization already had an IT infrastructure in place (including ERP, CRM and other transaction systems). The CIO had heard a lot about Sharepoint but was extremely wary of recommending an investment (afterall, Sharepoint does cost serious money!) in absence of a coherent idea of how the investment would be made to work for the company’s benefit.

Our preliminary studies revealed the company was not doing a good job of maintaining its documents and making these available to relevant employees when they needed it. For instance, imagine a consolidated purchase order released by the head-office in Mumbai; on behalf of five of its manufacturing locations. The physical copy of purchase documents was lying in the head-office and its scanned images were scattered in several mailboxes. A set of related documents, e.g. prior purchase requisitions and subsequent vendor invoices were all “available somewhere” but required the wasteful process of searching, retrieving (or asking for another copy) and collating these documents.

Sharepoint is not the only solution that could potentially resolve the above issues. While some of the “open source” document management solutions were ruled out because of the scale of operation (and the multiplied scale that would be needed to incorporate a host of future requirement scenarios). A couple of “high-end” document/content management solutions proved to be too expensive (vis-à-vis Sharepoint). Technically, these solutions offered a number of advanced capabilities that Sharepoint does not offer; these were simply not needed by the customer.

We advised the CIO to build his business case around this business need and use the other business requirements (e.g. intranet portal; collaborative workspaces etc) as supplementary scenarios.

So, what is the point I am making?

First, there is NO elevator pitch for Sharepoint. An elevator is no doubt an exciting place for decision making, but the wrong one while deciding to invest in Sharepoint!

Second, Sharepoint is not a ready-to-display painting. Rather, it is a canvass for you to realize your own ideas. Good old (boring!) method - of identifying business needs, visualizing solution scenarios, comparing various options and then building the investment case – remains your best bet!

This being the first post on this blog, I would look forward to your views and opinion. My attempt is to describe Sharepoint from “business viewpoint” instead of “technical viewpoint”. In my next few posts, I intend to cover some of the following subjects (apart from business case):

• 
  
  Various versions of Sharepoint (and licensing aspects)
• 
  
  Your intranet / enterprise portal strategy and Sharepoint’s role in it
• 
  
  Enterprise content management strategy and Sharepoint’s role in it
• 
  
  Enterprise collaboration strategy and Sharepoint’s role in it
• 
  
  How Sharepoint extends your organization to your extranet partners and customers
• 
  
  Sharepoint as a potential game changer in Business Intelligence domain
• 
  
  Sharepoint 2010 – preview and updates (business viewpoint)

Feel free to let me know if you would like me to address any other topics; or to steal my thunder on the above topics!