While scientists at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) search for the elusive ‘god particle’ to help solve the mysteries of the universe, a number of participants at this year’s KM World and Intranet conference have come in search of the ‘KM particle’; the one unifying element that permeates all organizations and will help unify KM theory. Microsoft Sharepoint presents itself as that element.
Sharepoint can be somewhat described by looking at its six pillars: collaboration, portal, search, content management, business focus, and business intelligence. Confused yet? Don’t worry. So was I.
My understanding is that Sharepoint is the answer to anyone who has ever wanted a piece of technology that would help people connect with one another, collaboratively create and share content, communicate with one another, seamlessly manage all of their email, documents, and webpages, and aid information discovery through a search engine. Most of this is achieved through Sharepoint’s blogging tool, wiki, web content management, instant messaging, facebook-like profile pages, workflows and the list goes on. Sounds great, doesn’t it?
Like co-speaker Cindy Gordon said today, Sharepoint has its “good, bad, and ugly.” I wasn’t able to sympathize with any of the workshop participants (largely IT based) who shared their woes of trying to implement Sharepoint because I’ve never had to manage X number of servers or hire .NET programmers. What did strike me, is how little we talked about the user experience and people side of Sharepoint. Or better yet, the cultural implications of having a tool like Sharepoint.
What really powers Microsoft Sharepoint is a new way of thinking and a new way of working. KM literature abounds with the need for a tool to help identify internal expertise in organizations, to give communities of practice a virtual space, and better information and records management. Unfortunately, if experts don’t want to be found, or communities of practice don’t exisit, or basic information and records management principles aren’t in place, then no heapings of Microsoft Sharepoint are going to work.
But ultimately, that’s where I see myself coming in. If I try hard enough, I could draw blood from the stone. I could use the tool as a conversation and education piece around the need to have good IM and RM and the possibility of breaking down organizational boundaries to build communities around common work. Would Sharepoint be the best tool to help me do that? I’m not sure. I can’t be sure, until I try. But, frankly, I don’t think I really care. I just want to learn to use and be a part of any tool that makes a solid attempt.
Some nugget take-aways from this session include:
- All organizations are different
- Sharepoint comes in so many different sizes and colours, it really depends on what you see as your organization’s most pressing knowledge management needs.
- Cost of training
- Like any new application, its important to remember the user community. Everyone, regardless of their silo in the organization, must develop a shared understanding.
- Training costs can be decreased if there is a shared commitment to decentralize training (a training rep per department perhaps) as well as certain administrative capabilities.
- The basic building blocks of Sharepoint are Lists and Libraries
- Lists, for me, translates into fields of a database, which are all highly customizable.
- Libraries with elements such a versioning, security permissions, MS Office integration, file management, all point towards electronic document management.
- Do your homework
- There a different flavours of tools that help promote KM principles and practices, but without getting to sample a few, how will you know which flavour you like best? Give yourself some space to explore and learn about the different kinds so that when you go large scale, you know exactly what it can and can’t do.
- The point about a shared understanding warrants repeating here because exploration of new tools doesn’t have to be a siloed experience.
Some memorable quotes:
- “Email is dead.”
- “In order to optimize any search engine, you need at least one full time person dedicated to the task.”
- “[Sharepoint] is not the best…, but its about having a common tool. It’s good enough.”
- “The best place to learn more about Sharepoint is YouTube.”
#1 by Dale Arseneault - September 23rd, 2008 at 04:56
Nice post Peter. I detect a bit of the “writer” in you looking for expression opportunities..
As always, success is about people, and not about tools, so much attention needs to be paid to motivations, practices, process, principles and capabilities. In the APQC Emerging Technolgies best practices study knowledge transfer session it was clear from many of the particpants who had implemented Sharepoint that success was directly related to the amount of time spent in advance configuring the user experience to enable Sharepoint as a tool, and not a barrier. Common perspective is that Sharepoint is not an “out of the box” solution. And from what I heard, the amount of that investment was very, very significant.
#2 by Dale Arseneault - September 23rd, 2008 at 05:02
On the “email is dead” comment, in some respects I certainly hope so. eMail has it’s place, but is being used for way too many purposes that it was never intended for – e.g. many-to-many conversations for decision making and problem solving.
Having alternatives that enable more effective coordination and collaboration will be an enabler for more effective knowledge work – provided that in so doing,these alternatives are well integrated and relatively seamless – and do not become technology silos of themselves. It’s fine for individuals to have multiple accounts on delicious, slideshare, wordpress, librarything, PBwiki, youtube, myspace, bubble.us, flikr etc. but let’s hope users in the enterprise do not have to deal with multiple logins, multiple user interfaces etc. yikes!
#3 by Peter Zakrzewski - September 23rd, 2008 at 18:10
Just wanted to drop a quick note regarding the “Email is dead” comment. I posed the question of whether or not email is dead or dying to Tony Byrne from CMSWatch after his presentation “Managing the Message Mountain”. Tony’s response was a flat out “No”. According to Tony, despite the digital generation’s move away from email in their personal digital lives, the moment they step into the workforce they soon realize that email is the prominent mode of virtual communication.
My take on that is that the digital generation has realized the shortcomings of email and has turned to other available digital mediums of communicating with one another. The only question is, when will organizations learn what the digital generation already knows to be true?
#4 by Bev. Graham - September 24th, 2008 at 06:05
I wonder if anyone has been talking about the collaborative features in other document management systems? I was at the meeting on the EDRMS road map on Monday – what I heard there and what I have heard in other places with AEP is that future directions for P8 will/should include collaborative features. Are we exploring those? My understanding is that Sharepoint is, simply, another tool. What are we doing about the tool we have? OR is Sharepoint such a strong example that we can extrapolate?
#5 by Andrew - September 25th, 2008 at 05:25
Peter – software development 101. SOLUTIONS = people, process and technology. If you are missing one you do not have a solution.
“collaboration, portal, search, content management, business focus, and business intelligence.” – this is a sales pitch not a solution
The biggest failure of software solutions is that people focus on the technology first. Or they think that using technology will somehow make the problem go away.
The first thing you need to ask yourself is what is the business problem you are trying to solve. And then get more detailed (read use case survey)