As a business executive you may be aware that SharePoint, capable of delivering considerable and rapid business value, can just as quickly end up off-track producing a disaster.

No business is immune from this ‘SharePoint Paradox’. Understanding and avoiding it is an essential part of SharePoint success.

SharePoint Popularity

Did you know that SharePoint 2007 is Microsoft’s most popular product ever, having achieved the $1billion 100 million sales mark faster than any other product in Microsoft history? A position achieved with none of the marketing hype that accompanies the likes of Office or Windows!

The popularity of SharePoint is built on a number of characteristics, including:

• it has a wealth of easy-to-use, web-based collaboration tools and templates that are analogous to Outlook and so receive ready uptake, while providing much more functionality
• it is easily extensible and customizable to fit your business
• only limited IT involvement is needed
• it is a real 80-20 tool, almost 80% of common business tasks can be achieved OOTB (out of the box)
• it integrates seamlessly with Active Directory, and with a bit more effort to your LOB applications, providing immediate secure use enterprise-wide
• it can scale easily

SharePoint truly is a ‘wonder tool’ of the information age.

It can takes less than 30 minutes to install SharePoint, create a website for collaboration, and start enjoying the benefits of collaborative resources such as task lists, calendars, versioned document libraries,  workflows, CMS publishing.

Where’s The Problem?

So where’s the problem?

The paradox is that SharePoint ‘s inherent ease-of-use is its own worst enemy. Rapid, organic, unstructured SharePoint growth leads to business disaster.

This pic shows the APAC SharePoint conference with eight Microsoft team members on stage including Mike Fitzmaurice, Joel Oleson and Angus Logan. SharePoint while initially appearing easy and straight forward is a sophisticated and complex technology requiring a depth of expertise

Consider the following post-installation problem scenarios based of real life experience:

• § SharePoint websites can be setup by a non-IT user in 5 minutes without requiring any pre-qualification or adherence to business mission or information architecture. Hundreds of non-business-aligned, duplicate and redundant sites tend to proliferate. The overhead in rationalizing is substantial
• § Document libraries are created by default and are easy to populate. Nomenclature and meta data standards are not automatically applied, and bad habits associated with existing file shares are often transported into the document libraries. Document search and manageability, precisely the issues meant to be improved, become bigger
• § The SharePoint install is so easy that the subsequent expertise needed to effectively configure and govern SharePoint within the business is often dramatically underestimated until it is too late
• § Once installed, the ongoing management of SharePoint can escape the rigors of IT because of its ready take-up and hand-over to the business

What To Do?

Without effective and specialized governance, SharePoint will only replicate your business’ existing problems at a faster rate and on a larger scale than you thought possible!

You need a governance plan enacted in your business by an appropriately empowered steering committee.

This SharePoint Steering Committee should have enough seniority to ensure two-way business alignment, ie that SharePoint is aligned with the existing business governance plan and associated initiatives like the information architecture; and that the business plan can be updated to incorporate benefits derived from SharePoint.

The ubiquitous and innocuous File Share. To some it may seem strange that just loading hundreds or thousands of documents from their existing file-shares into a SharePoint document library doesn’t solve the problem of not being able to find things!

This sounds pretty straight forward. Just apply a SharePoint governance plan and all will be okay.

There are literally thousands of pages of information available on SharePoint governance. The Microsoft SharePoint Governance Plan and Check Listare a good place to start. An Internet search will return tomes of material on governance with some documents in the realm of 600+ pages in length!

Why Problems?

Why are problems still encountered?

The answer to this is two-fold.

First, with this seeming wealth of governance related material available, none is definitive, and most discusses what governance should do, not how to do it!

For example, we discussed above that SharePoint should be aligned to the business governance plan and information architecture. But how do you do that?

Similarly, the Microsoft Governance Plan identifies that up to 30 roles can be used to effectively govern SharePoint, but which business has the resource to cover all those roles or can encumber existing staff with that level of extra responsibility? Which roles are essential and what actions should they cover?

Second, for most Microsoft Partners, SharePoint is just one product in their already overloaded product set.  Consider the plight of the poor Microsoft Partner with SharePoint 2007, Office 2007, Windows 2008, SQL 2008 and VS2008 all released little more than 12 months apart. Which Partner let alone business has the ability to skill-up on that range of technology? ‘Heroes’ or not!

Fewer organizations have a history with SharePoint beyond the current version, and almost none can take a ‘holistic’ view i.e. discuss a SharePoint solution in the context of the entirety of its features set.

Governance plans talk a lot about ‘What To Do’ but not ‘How To Do It’. You need an extensive history with SharePoint, all its incarnations ie portal, DMS, CMS, BI, horizontal and vertical platform application, experience in its application to various business issues, strengths and weaknesses, to be able to best plan its use in the organization.SharePoint Practice Governance, based on an extensive experience of this kind of ‘best practice’ - a definitive body of knowledge- allows for the proactive rather than reactive planning of the use of SharePoint in your organization. If you don’t use deeply experienced SharePoint resources with access to this Practice Governance you are faced with trying to ‘learn on the job’ and with SharePoint’s tendency towards rapid organic growth, if you don’t get it right from the start problems will overwhelm the resources available to manage SharePoint..

It is only from experiencing SharePoint’s strengths and weaknesses across its diverse range of functionality, from portal, to BI, to DMS, to CMS, forms, from generic horizontal platform to adapted vertical solution, and how it performs across diverse business applications, that you can begin to understand and identify SharePoint best practice and effective governance practices.

SharePoint Practice = Best Practice

In short, you need a lot of ‘SharePoint practice’ to be able to provide ‘SharePoint best practice’.

Most businesses can not afford to implement systems, let alone a widespread platform like SharePoint, on a trial and error basis trying to work out the best way to do things ‘on the job’ (though some Partners often try to get away with having their staff learn that way!)

So in conclusion as you work through your SharePoint implementation and ongoing management, if it isn’t producing the business advantage and results you expect, find a partner who has a SharePoint specialistion.

Draw on their rich best practice to source and develop your governance plan, stop the SharePoint paradox, and get the SharePoint results and business success you want.

In following articles I will explore Practice Governance and the best practice it is based upon in more detail.

Till next time - Julian