I work with many organizations with SharePoint intranet sites that are simply a MESS! Yes, that’s you and your intranet! Admit it — your intranet sites look like they were built in 1999 with big fonts, bigger graphics, static and outdated links & content, and absolutely no organization of the information and navigation presented to the end user.
Over the last decade perhaps small enhancements or attempts at redesign evolved your intranet incrementally. You now have some level of standards and branding at a global level. Perhaps your organization has finally consolidated and standardized on SharePoint and are even thinking about upgrading to 2010 in the next year or two. You’re also focused on the latest buzz words like “social” and “collaboration” – baking them into your overall strategy. However, down in the trenches you still have sites for functional areas or business units or regions that remain an unorganized mess of stale information.
I bet dozens of so-called team sites have also popped up with the intent of providing a better place for your organization to manage and update important content that really should be out on the intranet site for everyone to consume. However, those team sites also added to the mess. There’s even morenoise and confusion by limiting access and navigation to information with redundant content and links.
We call this information overload and have all read the stats on the hidden costs and wasted productivity because knowledge workers spend too much time looking for information. With the amount of digital information continuing to increase beyond expectations, it’s now even more difficult to search, browse, filter, and find the information than it was a decade ago. The year 2010 is coming to an end with over a decade of internet evolution and you ask yourself “Am I more productive today than I was 10 years ago?”
So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?
Now I’m sure you’re reading this post and immediately are Googling “New Year’s Resolutions” which returns top ten lists containing the resolution to: “Get Organized”. No doubt you also Google “clean up information mess” and you find a helpful article on Oprah.com about cleaning up clutter in your life. One interesting comment the organizational expert on Oprah.com made was how he defined clutter: ”anything that stands between you and the vision you have for your best life.” You can’t go wrong if you quote Oprah.com and this statement is so true — especially in our professional lives. Clutter is not necessarily an individual issue, but an organizational issue. And if your SharePoint implementation is a cluttered mess of information, then SharePoint stands between you and the vision you have for your business. And I have to highlight that the mess is not just something IT needs to address. The business users owns the information inside of SharePoint and the clutter is a shared responsibility. So what can you do? What can the champions, managers, power & end users of SharePoint do in 2011 to get organized?
There are 3 keys to get organized and clean up the SharePoint clutter:
1. Information Architecture. A somewhat abstract concept for non-technical people. This is not only about figuring out what you want your website to look like — the UI design perhaps. It includes identifying the intended audience and the inventory of content you intend on managing within the site and the users intend on consuming. It’s also about the underlying structure of the site or site collection and the images, documents, links, lists, and libraries you plan on managing and maintaining. Yes, it’s about metadata and your user’s ability to search, browse, filter, and find information. So start by:
“categorizing your information and blueprint how content should be structured and stored within SharePoint and presented to the end user”
2. Security. Once you have an understanding of the information architecture, you can then ensure your information is secure. Do you know if the content in your sites is secure right now? Are you absolutely sure with 100% confidence? Difficult questions to ask sometimes as politics always seem to play a part in the discussion with IT and Business here. It’s amazing how SharePoint forces the conversation about ownership, roles, and responsibilities. So sit down in 2011 and look at your security and answer the questions:
“In your SharePoint site(s), who owns what and who should have access to what?”
3. Governance. While governance is always a hot topic, the usual reference to this term is the overall SharePoint deployment with sub-topics such as backups, site creation, etc… However, this also refer to site owners and site collection administrators. Do they have a plan to ensure specific content has owners and is continually updated? What the process to source new content and ensure that information is posted in a timely manner to those individuals who should consume it? Who maintains membership to your site or site collection? So…
Define what governance means to you in 2011 and start governing your SharePoint Sites!
For those fans of Dexter…”tick, tick, tick”….that’s the sound of 2010 coming to an end. It’s time to get your information organized inside of SharePoint and focus on a clutter free world of sharing and pointing!!!
Follow me on twitter….
