What Is YOUR Firm’s SharePoint Balance?

Dan Neff, President of Aquent‘s IT Solutions (www.aquent-it-solutions.com) group, is pretty straightforward about it: “SharePoint is the most installed piece of software in the whole world that’s not being used properly…people don’t really understand what they’ve got.”

The Issue of Balance

Neff’s not talking about the need for SharePoint training; he’s talking about the need for SharePoint balance, specifically the balance between empowering small groups to act spontaneously and injecting some planning to create solutions with value beyond simple collaboration  This balance is always a prime consideration for group-oriented resources, but particularly acute with SharePoint since its potential reach across the enterprise is so vast and its potential integration is so deep.  Less obvious is how this issue of balance highlights larger issues of how the company deploys and manages technology for efficiency and competitive advantage.

Never have business users been more able to reorganize the basic building blocks of their work as meaningfully as they can with SharePoint. Never has IT been more solidly in an enabling role than they can by accelerating that discovery process, pointing out common pitfalls, and awakening users to advanced features.  User experimentation alone rarely produces robust, scalable solutions that can be put into production; centralized control alone frequently removes too much flexibility; reliable solutions require iterative loops of both perspectives.  SharePoint is hard-wired for exactly this meeting of minds.

Establishing (or re-establishing) productive balance is steadily rising on management’s priority list even now.   On one hand is the tremendous interest shown by IT and many work teams for ever broader and deeper workspaces, fueling SharePoint’s white-hot growth.   On the other hand are the leftover consequences that remain from SharePoint’s almost accidental arrival in many companies, complicating the way forward for both technologists and users, and affecting the speed with which enterprises can gain the full productivity enhancement SharePoint offers.

Because SharePoint entered many enterprises as a free component with Windows Server 2003 R2, many companies made SharePoint available to users as a toolset with minimal rules and recommendations for what it could do  and how to use it.  IT didn’t have to devote budget to its purchase, didn’t have to develop a business case to use it, didn’t require specially trained custodians, its future on the infrastructure roadmap was highly uncertain then, and, with SharePoint’s strong ties to Microsoft Office, the conservative approach was to make it available as a user tool for the power users who would explore it.

Discovery-ware No Longer

Fast-forward to today, where SharePoint is solidly on its way to being a cornerstone of the infrastructure roadmap, many more functions, features, and points of integration exist, and an entire cottage industry has grown up to provide the third-party tools, services, and web parts that extend the base functionality for specific business uses.  All of this experience using SharePoint based solutions to unlock unprecedented productivity is giving Microsoft a much clearer product roadmap of the way forward  And, it is giving IT departments new methods to empower users.

The most full-featured version to date is MOSS 2007, which, unlike the original version, does require budget, IT management, and planning to get the greatest value from its many licensing commitments.

In short, SharePoint has baggage.  Reintroducing users to the productivity value from the platform-that-the-free-toolset-has-evolved-into might best be organized as a mini-project in itself.   The place to begin is with those users who have some awareness of SharePoint.  In broad-brush terms, they tend to fall into three categories, each needing a slightly tailored view of the way forward.

1) “Oh No, Not SharePoint!”

Many users first came across SharePoint in the “collaboration tools” section of their intranet. The pages looked like a cross between MS Office and a basic web page, so many users experimented with a document library, or sharing a team calendar, or a threaded discussion.

“A lot of users assumed SharePoint was one of those Microsoft applications that would help you figure out how to use it,” observes James Beck, Co-Founder of Synergy Corporate Technologies (http://www.synergyonline.com), “but they quickly found that was not the case.”

There wasn’t much in the way of guidance, or recommended practices, or administrative rules, so many workspaces acquired confusing file hierarchies, required ever more manual manipulation to stay even marginally useful, ever more rigid rules, frequent re-creations to start over. Then there was the issue of sub-sites, many of which contained some of the same resources.  Result – frustration at the chaos, declining use, and an attitude of SharePoint being little more than a glorified file server.

“We encountered it,” says Neff, “we proposed a portal for the analytics team at a major client – when they learned we were proposing SharePoint, they nearly canceled the project.  SharePoint had simply been pushed out to them in the past, had seen some small use, and then became a dumping ground.  The business decision-maker considered it an organizational disaster because of the confusion that resulted.”

“In the early days, the user frustration that sometimes resulted from early-adopter departments experimenting with SharePoint was really the flip-side of the hunger for features and functions that were simply not available out-of-the-box.  The market for third-party web parts began there, with strong demand for parts to streamline a workflow, or simplify user process, observes Wes Bryan, Sr. Product Manager of Bamboo Solutions (www.bamboosolutions.com).   Bamboo provides a suite of Web Parts, Solution Accelerators and customized SharePoint products for project management, social networking, business intelligence, portal administration and content management.

The Way Forward – Re-engaging such departments is widely thought to be worth the effort, and not just for the department productivity improvements that are at stake.

“At some point, and not too far away, being adept at interacting with SharePoint workspaces will be as necessary to an individual user’s skill-set as knowing how to use MS Office,” claims  Ross Freedman of RightPoint Consulting (http://rightpointconsulting.com).  ”SharePoint is going to be the glue that holds so many other things together.”

Chief among tactics for getting through to hold-out departments are:

• Keep the technology and the business separate in the discussion – probe for chronic business problems the department confronts and demonstrate ways of overcoming them using SharePoint.
• Stress the procedural differences between using SharePoint now vs. using SharePoint originally – successful implementations don’t start with experimental tactics now, they start with business goals, and SharePoint now is robust enough to deliver.
• Take department management on an internal tour of successful team sites used elsewhere in the company and illustrate ease of administration. Highlight tools, guidelines, templates, web parts that IT has provided since initial rollout that specifically deliver user productivity improvements over current methods and previous attempts.
• Reassure that SharePoint now occupies a more central place in IT infrastructure management and planning than originally and outline IT’s ongoing role for scaling SharePoint and connecting it to corporate data and LOB applications.
• As illustration of that point, identify any common resources that IT provides for the company that were developed in SharePoint. Especially if the user interface doesn’t resemble out-of-the-box SharePoint.
• If nothing of the sort exists, consider converting some basic files from the shared server to SharePoint – e.g. staff directory in an Excel file; group calendar; group contacts; project FAQ’s; IT trouble tickets; HR info
• Find the early-adopter in the group and cultivate a liaison role
• Check in regularly if they try SharePoint again to seed productive habits and help them expand the functions well before frustration sets in again.
• Use Group Policy to set the internal home page to the home page of the company’s SharePoint site, making certain that HR/internal communications keeps the information updated regularly.

2) “We’ve Gone About As Far As We Can Go“

Some SharePoint user groups, frequently propelled by an early-adopter team member, explored the toolset deeply enough to become productive with it, but are now in a sort of enforced holding pattern. They are using some basic SharePoint features, are aware of other functions that could be provided, but require IT resources to enable them.

“We find that about 50% of our customers have had some experience with SharePoint, most of it is very rudimentary.  They built some basic workspaces, but they’re not full-featured enough to address the full business need,” comments Freedman, of RightPoint.  “A significant number of the calls we get is from companies just waking up to the fact that they need professional help to take things farther.”

“SharePoint right out of the box is missing some things that a lot of business users really need,” comments Beck. “Too many users assume that SharePoint is self-contained and it isn’t.  The SharePoint they first experience should be thought of as a 1.0 version.  Other parts and services are needed to turn it into a solution.”

“We used to get calls from IT groups who had hit a snag in production and needed help working around a shortcoming or finding a more robust way to bring legacy data into a SharePoint  project site,” notes Bamboo’s Bryan. “Now the bulk of the calls we get tend to occur higher in the process, where plans are being laid.  Some of these result in custom web parts, or solution accelerator bundles. It’s a much more disciplined process aiming at bigger goals.”

The Way Forward – Provided you can get to these work groups before frustration weakens the productive habits that SharePoint has helped form, these groups are in the ultimate “teachable moment” – they have had some direct experience, have accomplished at least some productive routines via SharePoint, and can see other benefits just out of reach.

Highest-value issues to tackle with such groups include:

• Meet with the work teams making these requests and identify the “next-stage” activities they were unable to complete, then walk them through these if their workspace currently supports it. If not, begin a priority list and rank each requested function as to whether it can be provided by: a) configuration; b) purchased web parts/modules/templates; c) broader/deeper integration; d) .NET development
• Push these groups to create a roadmap for how their SharePoint workspaces should evolve – what functions are most needed, what reporting of KPI’s, legacy system access that would improve productivity. This is functionally the same as a departmental vision for how work can best get done and can serve as a way of organizing the dialog between the business group and IT.
• Establish the boundary line between the department’s site admin and IT’s overall SharePoint admin
• Identify quantifiable metrics for reporting program and/or department ROI to highlight the value of SharePoint-managed workflows.
• Pay special attention to department resources such as Excel spreadsheets and Access databases and offer to convert those for use via SharePoint. These are some of the highest-productivity uses of SharePoint features and may help with corporate compliance initiatives.

3) “We’ve Got HOW MANY SharePoint Sites?!”

If a third distinct cluster of users actually exists in any numbers in an enterprise, the SharePoint phenomenon can be said to have come full-circle, because these are the users propelling the unbridled growth of SharePoint workspaces in many companies. IT management reports being shocked when they run tools to determine how many SharePoint sites exist, and they get back results that are orders of magnitude higher than they imagined…e.g. expecting 40/finding 1000; expecting 200/finding 4000; expecting a few hundred/finding 15,000.

“It can happen anywhere along the spectrum,” says Ross Freedman, “big companies and small ones, you never know when the buzz is going to take hold. We were at a client the other day who was certain they had one SharePoint workspace because they had just posted a demo site of the SharePoint tools.  A brief audit uncovered nine SharePoint workspaces and several more being worked on.  IT freaked at the speed at which users were putting up their own sites and how few basic controls there were for managing any of this.”

Bamboo’s Wes Bryan continues: “We quickly learned that some of the most valuable webparts we could provide were those that simplified administration and oversight, not just for the business users, but for the IT administrators who were facing a proliferation of SharePoint workspaces. ”

The temptation is to believe that these rogue islands of collaboration and information-sharing are thriving oases of tight, coordinated activity and high team value…user temperament finding just the right tool for operating across company silos.

James Beck isn’t buying it.

“I’ll bet money that companies who discover all these rogue SharePoint sites are finding mostly failed experiments,” he asserts. “Expectations tend to be all over the place, assumptions guiding activity more than understanding, resulting in waning activity over time as they keep having to branch out to accomplish some task that SharePoint doesn’t yet accommodate.”

Tucked away among the legions of such SharePoint sites, there are probably a handful of even worse outcomes, according to Neff, workspaces that users have come to depend on.

“We’ve seen some SharePoint sites go the way all user-enabled tech goes sometimes, which is straight from experiment to production.  Just look at Excel.  SharePoint is more susceptible to this than many other technologies because it has so many more pieces which appear to be so much more accessible.  Imagine what would happen if database tools were just as user-inviting and made openly available?  Luckily, you have to be pretty technical to set up a database whereas you don’t with SharePoint.”

The Way Forward – Those who work with SharePoint most see the current “SharePoint sprawl” as nothing less than the coastline of IT’s empowerment role AND its governance role as SharePoint matures.

“This is exactly why we don’t recommend that companies start with WSS, see if it resonates with users, then apply the lessons learned to a business case for MOSS,” offers Synergy’s James Beck. “The very thing most needed to ensure successful implementation is the very thing missing from such an approach – integration into the broader IT infrastructure – security, scalable capacity, dedicated support, Active Directory, backup, even database structure. If SharePoint really takes off, IT is in major reactive mode to gather all this up, develop a strategy and assign a budget.”

“Business goals have to guide the process,” asserts Bamboo’s Bryan. “Every technology has always stressed the importance of regular dialog between the business user and IT. But with SharePoint the absence of such a dialog is very obvious – it results in sprawl or users doing highly unsound things with sensitive data, or elaborate workarounds long after the third-party providers have solved the root problem with new web parts.”

“Unless the company has made a real conscious commitment to SharePoint at a strategic level, about all the governance we see is occasionally at the user department level,” adds Aquent’s Neff. “The life-of-its-own implementations that are really changing the ways departments work invariably comes from those departments whose teams and management have decided what they will use it for and how they will keep it organized.  But that hardly answers the larger issues of security and conformity to the company’s compliance policies. The issue is not one of control; it is one of ‘mutual empowerment’ for the creation of high-value solutions.”

Some specific steps being taken by many companies to get their arms around the SharePoint “phenomenon” include:

• Putting in a review and approval process to be followed by anyone wishing to create a new SharePoint workspace, to keep the sprawl from getting worse in the short term.

“We helped one client put a small server farm in place strictly for SharePoint,” explains RightPoint’s Ross Freedman, ” along with a simple request process for user groups to request server space for putting up new workspaces.  Not only did this put some structure around what had been an ad-hoc process, but it reinforced with every new site that SharePoint done well was a deep collaboration between users and IT.  The process didn’t communicate control nearly as much as thoughtful resource allocation and enablement.”

• Find out just what the current situation is. The emergence of third-party tools has reduced the effort required to scan the environment to discover how many SharePoint exist, what they’re running on, and whether they are team or individual sites. This will be invaluable in determining how much activity each site gets, which prioritizes the effort for contacting use departments to establish some basic structure for going forward.
• Designate an IT team, comprised of “the usual suspects” to be the custodians of SharePoint. Think of this team as a bulls-eye, with an IT administrator, database, web architect, network capacity engineer, Security and Compliance experts in the center and custodians of other aspects of the infrastructure affected by SharePoint (e.g. Active Directory, Exchange, etc.) in rings farther out.
• Conduct sessions with the current stakeholders using SharePoint to define where the line is between user administration/configuration and IT governance. Can users add templates when they discover one that is helpful or must this be requested from IT? Must document libraries be restricted by file type? What about remote users? What approval process will be required to permit extended team members from vendors, consultants, and suppliers to participate in a workspace? Many of these may require some deliberation before a firm policy is set, but these dialogs will be highly useful in maintaining a dynamic view of user needs for the platform.
• Demonstrate what’s possible and what productive habits look like by using SharePoint to establish a continuing channel of communication with users. Especially as user interest spreads through word-of-mouth, provide a resource for up-to-date information on IT resources, processes for extending SharePoint, special needs and organize the information is a manner to guide users toward productive habits.

The Fulcrum

The fulcrum of the SharePoint balance issue may turn out to be corporate culture, specifically the corporation’s longstanding practices about how technology is governed. Is IT primarily the custodian of capacity, backup, and recovery, or is IT the introducer of most technology innovation? If performing the essential knowledge-work of collaboration means that the “big iron” in the back office needs to be accessed in new ways, what is the protocol for validating new methods before making the investment to enable them?

“SharePoint really grays the lines between IT and the business.  SharePoint is such a colossal tool, really a Swiss army knife of a platform,” says Beck.  ”It can accommodate almost anything. Instead of organizing information on a webpage, we’re now organizing workflow functions on a webpage that once were available only as point-solutions. Organizations trying to fit SharePoint governance into some rigid framework of traditional IT management are in for a bumpy ride.”

Other comfortable, or at least familiar, lines are being blurred also – like the one between user interface and programming.  SharePoint templates and user interface elements take on almost application-type distinctness, since SharePoint’s can reach almost anywhere into a LOB application, a remote database, the web, or a team-member’s desktop.  What this does to corporate identity standards when the visuals aren’t just clicks for more content but touch off whole sequences of activity?

“SharePoint is a toolbox, pure and simple,” reminds Neff. “A huge one. But it doesn’t contain everything every possible use might require.  Additional parts are needed and basic services to get the most out of it.  In short, some resource is required to turn the toolbox into solutions, whether that is an internal IT group or an outside specialist firm. With something as deep and broad as SharePoint, solutions don’t just happen, they are constructed.”

ABOUT THE WRITERS

Robert Hamilton and Ben Bradley write about the intersection of technology and business for the Bradley Wiltjer Marketing Group, Inc. (www.bradleywiltjer.com) – a technology marketing agency that specializes in lead generation, marketing and media relations.