“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!
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Its good things, keep share
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