With all the hype around everything “social” today, SharePoint is sometimes portrayed in a negative light and an obstacle to enabling collaboration. Competitive pure play social vendors want to blame the tool, point out SharePoint’s short-comings, and hype their own products as new and different. Yet is new and different really any better? Is SharePoint really the obstacle? Or are the real obstacles your enterprise IT department’s inability to quickly respond to business demands and the inertia of large organizations to change culture? read more
January 19, 2011
Using the CMM to Benchmark Your SharePoint Investment?
How do you know if or when you truly are optimizing the investment you’ve made in the Microsoft SharePoint platform? You’ve spent last year creating your SharePoint roadmaps and have grand plans for social capabilities or perhaps the cloud. Or maybe you know enough about SharePoint to be dangerous and are just getting started with formulating your enterprise implementation. You have a few success stories about how SharePoint has enabled productivity or saved money and you’ve justified the business case to move to the latest 2010 release. However, is there end state to a platform that offers what seems to be an infinite amount of features and capabilities for solving an infinite amount of business problems across all functions and industries? Is there a point when your implementation of the SharePoint platform reaches an optimized level of maturity?
Among the tools out there that might help you is the capability maturity model (CMM). Management consultants seem to love this model and I see it from time to time. However, often times I encounter a version of this model that is simply vague or too broad. Then I scratch my head and wonder how can this CMM practically help me? It’s quite subjective and doesn’t seem to tell me what actions I need to focus on. Can I really apply this to SharePoint?
The Capability Maturity Model involves creating some type of benchmark for comparison. It is interesting to note that the CMM was originally developed to assess government contractor processes relating to software development projects. Wikipedia has an adequate definition of the model as I won’t go into too much detail here. In a nutshell, the CMM has 5 levels of maturity upon which something is measured. The following triangle diagram is simply illustrative and the CMM usually takes the shape of a matrix format:
- Initial (chaotic, ad hoc, individual heroics) – the starting point for use of a new process.
- Managed – the process is managed in accordance with agreed metrics.
- Defined – the process is defined/confirmed as a standard business process, and decomposed to levels 0, 1 and 2 (the latter being Work Instructions).
- Quantitatively managed
- Optimizing – process management includes deliberate process optimization/improvement.
If you applied the CMM to SharePoint, it’s likely most large and small organizations are currently somewhere between #1 and #3 in the model (whatever that means). However, applying this model to a SharePoint implementation that addresses dozens of business needs with dozens of capabilities and features is just not as easy as it looks. If you’re assessing the maturity of SharePoint, you really need to assess the maturity of collaboration and ECM in your organization. And it may involve cultural considerations as well as other SharePoint-related technologies (e.g. OCS/Lynx, Office, Project Server, etc.). So where to begin if you want some type of model to benchmark your SharePoint implementation against? How do we get to #4 and eventually to #5 so you can pat yourself on the back knowing you are finally optimizing your investment?
Perhaps more appropriate questions we should be asking are:
- What do #4 or #5 really mean to you and your organization?
- Is #5 Optimization what you should be striving for in the first place?
I might suggest that “Optimization” be replaced by something like “Value Creation” (defined by concepts like knowledge, analytics, collaboration, learning, innovation, and relationships). Whenever I wonder if I’m helping a client “Optimize SharePoint”, I tend to think about maximizing value while minimizing the effort (and costs) involved for administrators, developers, project managers, and all individuals that use and support the platform. Isn’t this the real nirvana we should be striving for?
I’m hoping to research this more over the course of this year and am interested if other’s have attempted something like this.
January 14, 2011
Share Your Journey…
Changing the way people work, share information, manage knowledge, and communicate with each other is very much a challenge of organizational cultural. Let’s face it — implementing technology like SharePoint is a journey. Most of us IT or business professionals who have led or are currently leading their organization’s “social and collaborative” transformation leveraging the SharePoint platform share similar experiences. Many weeks or months of effort, off-hours and weekends learning & experimenting, and selling decision makers & users on the benefits. Our journeys have taken some groups from the dark ages of manual paper-based collaborative activities to innovative automated digital solutions built all on SharePoint. Some involve custom development, yet many were built with shoe-string budgets leveraging out-of-the-box functionality of SharePoint with the occasional third party application. It’s not often that those in trenches get to swap their stories. If you’re lucky, you get to attend one of the many SharePoint conferences and listen to someone else tell their story. Fortunately Microsoft understands the best way to share knowledge and sell the benefits of SharePoint is to let customers tell their own story and demonstrate real results and benefits in the real world. I encourage everyone to share your SharePoint story. The first step on the road to SharePoint success is simply understanding the possibilities so you can chart a destination of your own.
You have until February 16th to submit your story: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/sharepointjourneys/Pages/default.aspx
December 17, 2010
So what’s your New Year’s Resolution for 2011 to clean up this information mess?
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….
December 17, 2010
Demystifying Business Intelligence on SharePoint
One of the more confusing aspects of SharePoint is its Business Intelligence (BI) capabilities. Why is it confusing (at least for me)? Well, this is AIIM and we spend most of our time discussing information involving unstructured content as opposed to data. And the BI world involves databases and data warehouses and OLAP cubes and other related buzzwords like EPM or business analytics. BI is really its own unique niche. Leave it to Microsoft to build BI capabilities into SharePoint along with everything else and in the SharePoint 2010 wheel — it’s called “Insights”. Whatever you call it, the hidden value of SharePoint is its ability to manage data and content together.
One typical example of a SharePoint solution involving BI and data is a performance reporting portal. In generic terms, this is what a Performance Reporting Portal might include:
While I hesitate using the word “portal” in today’s world of social sharing & collaboration, business users love their portals and dashboards. This is also a request I am seeing more and more of as business users are beginning to realize that SharePoint can be used for more than just intranet pages, team-sites and document libraries. Additionally, there is real business value that executives recognize in this type of solution (and they’re more willing to approve funding for this type of project).
Now this type of solution is just one example. As Microsoft defines it, there’s also business intelligence for the community as well as the organization. I’ll reference this Technet article http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff394320.aspx on “Choosing a business intelligence tool in SharePoint Server. There’s a great diagram and related information that map the capabilities of SharePoint BI tools to the appropriate business scenarios where they might be used. While you may not require all the services SharePoint provides, you’ll want to identify your requirements and business needs. You might also consider drafting a roadmap for your business unit or organization that outlines your use of SharePoint in the short and long term.
In some cases, you might find yourself completely replacing your Hyperion or Cognos applications with Microsoft’s SharePoint Business Intelligence. In other cases, you might think about how your SAP reporting and SharePoint can work together more seamlessly. There are obvious cost savings in consolidating platforms and vendors and it’s quite possible that 80% of what you use your existing BI tools for can be migrated to and managed on SharePoint’s platform. Furthermore, there are also added benefits of combining data, dashboards, and reporting with all the collaborative and social features that SharePoint provides. And perhaps one day, we can end the use of the word “portal”!
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Reference: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=167170
This covers an overview of business intelligence in SharePoint Server and provides you with an overview of each business intelligence service and when you might use the service, architecture for application of the business intelligence services and how they work together in a topology, a list of possible data sources for each business intelligence service.
December 8, 2010
A Look at Microsoft BPOS
It’s the time of year that many IT organizations are finalizing their 2011 budgets and strategy. One of the things on the radar screen for many organizations is Microsoft BPOS (aka as business productivity online suite which will soon fall under the umbrella of Office 365 now in Beta). BPOS is a set of hosted messaging and collaboration solutions for the “cloud” comprised of SharePoint, Exchange, and Communications (and soon Microsoft Office). I don’t intend to discuss how to migrate Exchange mailboxes or SharePoint sites to BPOS as other resources on the web already address that more technically. I do, however, want to begin the BPOS conversation because I have yet to see anything written about it on AIIM Communities to date.
One of the first questions I had about BPOS was “is it any different than web hosting?” Generally, when I think of web hosting, it’s a situation where the hosting company supports the hardware and operating system but not the applications. With most hosting agreements, you’re charged a fee for hosting, storage and bandwidth. With BPOS, it’s a service charged per user per month where the applications are supported by the vendor (e.g. Microsoft) and you simply administer the application. At least that’s how I differentiated the two.
Another question I had was which version of BPOS do you need? Well, there are currently 2 versions: BPOS-S and BPOS-D. BPOS-S is the Standard suite where you’re essentially renting 1 or more SharePoint site collections with web based administration (and 250 megabytes of storage allocated per person). BPOS-D is the dedicated version which requires a minimum of 5000 seats and longer term agreement with more granular administration and unlimited site collections. There will also be a government version as well with more attention paid to security, privacy and compliance.
The third question I had was simply “why BPOS”? And the answer is simple economics. BPOS reduces the administrative burden and associated data center, hardware, and software costs as you’re shifting to a pay as you consume service model for your messaging and collaboration infrastructure. Organizations won’t have to worry about backup/restore, disaster recovery, hiring technical resources to support the infrastructure, etc… You’re essentially shifting some risk to a 3rd party vendor. Another key advantage is time to market. In most IT organizations, it can take months to go from approval of funding to implementation of the technology solution. BPOS can help you accelerate the deployment time for solutions.
Of course the broader conversation here beyond Microsoft’s BPOS offering is collaboration and ECM in the cloud. It’s about trusting a 3rd party to manage your messaging and unstructured content and hopefully providing better capabilities for end users at a lower cost. And for anyone interested in understanding more about the value of Microsoft’s online service offerings, I’d recommend checking out the following:
http://www.microsoft.com/online/partner/solutions-showcase.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/b/msonline/archive/tags/customer+story/
