Customers Revolt
Tuesday: August 14, 2007 6:39 AM
I had the opportunity to speak to a C-level executive at another company about Collaborative Solutions and in particular, Sharepoint. For two years, his IT experts were telling him that Sharepoint didn’t scale, wasn’t reliable, extensible, or manageable. Reluctantly, they did setup an environment but Client-Support was non-existence and collaboration wasn’t supported or encouraged. The IT group finally informed the executive that they needed to buy a collaborative tool which they did implement. Funny thing happened along the way… the customers revolted. Almost 100% of the user base told the IT executive to take a hike. What? That’s right the customers revolted. They showed him how they were using Sharepoint and the direct business value they had created. How could this be that a product so maligned by his IT experts be so embraced by the user community?
We are our own worst enemy. We stand in the way of progress just to hold on to the last bastion of control we have. We fail to see the enormous opportunity, just as many were late to the Web (i.e. Mr. Gates).
I talked about to him how our combined organization now has 23,000 collaborative sites. I discussed how groups are performing the same tasks with half or a third of the staff. We even discussed how they could replace their Intranet with one more collaborative in nature. Needless to say, this movement isn’t about Sharepoint but about collaboration and social software. We are seeing the struggle with a transformation that fundamentally will alter how we (IT) do business. No one ever said that creating transparency and eliminating the friction would be easy and without resistance.
What are you (IT Professional) telling your users or leadership about collaboration? What will you tell them when they revolt and demand it? The difference between us and Mr. Gates, is that when he discovered he was wrong, he changed the focus of his entire organization and embraced the web with vigor.
I had the opportunity to speak to a C-level executive at another company about Collaborative Solutions and in particular, Sharepoint. For two years, his IT experts were telling him that Sharepoint didn’t scale, wasn’t reliable, extensible, or manageable. Reluctantly, they did setup an environment but Client-Support was non-existence and collaboration wasn’t supported or encouraged. The IT group finally informed the executive that they needed to buy a collaborative tool which they did implement. Funny thing happened along the way… the customers revolted. Almost 100% of the user base told the IT executive to take a hike. What? That’s right the customers revolted. They showed him how they were using Sharepoint and the direct business value they had created. How could this be that a product so maligned by his IT experts be so embraced by the user community?
We are our own worst enemy. We stand in the way of progress just to hold on to the last bastion of control we have. We fail to see the enormous opportunity, just as many were late to the Web (i.e. Mr. Gates).
I talked about to him how our combined organization now has 23,000 collaborative sites. I discussed how groups are performing the same tasks with half or a third of the staff. We even discussed how they could replace their Intranet with one more collaborative in nature. Needless to say, this movement isn’t about Sharepoint but about collaboration and social software. We are seeing the struggle with a transformation that fundamentally will alter how we (IT) do business. No one ever said that creating transparency and eliminating the friction would be easy and without resistance.
What are you (IT Professional) telling your users or leadership about collaboration? What will you tell them when they revolt and demand it? The difference between us and Mr. Gates, is that when he discovered he was wrong, he changed the focus of his entire organization and embraced the web with vigor.
