Collaborage: Enterprise 2.0 Implementation Overview

This post is a rebuttal, of sort, to the enormous Sharepoint bashing that has taken place over the past few weeks within the blog and twitter communities. Thomas Vandar Wal's post on Sharepoint 2007: Gateway Drug to Enterprise 2.0 was of particular interest because he actually took the time to put some thought into his comments. While we are not joined at the hip in agreement, I respect his research and thoughts on the Sharepoint product.

Let me begin be bringing the small print to the forefront and say that I have not spoken to hundreds of Sharepoint owners but rather collaborated with tens of thousands of customers in three different organizations. While I have talked to my fair share of Sharepoint owners, I want to stick to my own observations. This does limit my point of view and perhaps skews it into a specific direction. Also, it's not fair for me to pick apart each statement without getting a full understanding from the author. Ideally, this should be a give an take but that being said, here goes:

Organizations can be described in many ways, from being an open enterprise to a hierarchal one. However, 99.9% of the organizations are somewhere in between these two extremes. Most organizations, without Sharepoint, have evolved to communicate the organizational messages, coordinate tasks and efforts, and in most cases, cooperate within the different business units. I would label these organizations as slanted toward the hierarchal side. Sharepoint does help in these areas but the key utility of the product is collaboration which continues toward our journey to an open organization. That is to say, you need a more open organization to collaborate than one still segmented by organizational structure. The tool doesn't define the degree of openness in an organization; it's how the tool is implemented. I do agree that if you continue to move toward an open enterprise, your ability to successfully deploy Social Software goes up. An open organization is ideal for implementing Sharepoint.

I am surprised that this number isn't higher considering the vagueness of the question. 50% of folks use it to share information, excellent! They should keep working and they might get that number higher. If that number is true for my organizations, then it leaves 53% or 26,000 Sharepoint environments using it for something else other than document management. Sweet!

Ok, I had to chuckle at this one considering we have heard this same comments for years when we deployed document management, web content management, records management, and most every other information management solution. There is a fine line between having too much information and the right information. To think that Enterprise 2.0 is going to solve this problem is a tad naive. In fact, I might argue that Enterprise 2.0 will double, triple, or 10x the amount of information within the enterprise. Like in Web 2.0, 90% of the information will be crap and worthless. Finding that 10% will be the key. One must assume that tags, rating, and book marking is somehow going to make this flood of information manageable might be an overstatement. What Enterprise 2.0 might do for you is to personalize your interests which eliminates much of the noise. Of course, Sharepoint does the same thing in the MOSS environment by implementing various solution sets to help in managing this volume of information. You can have ranking, rating, tagging, and many other 2.0 components. Of course, nothing beats a good search engine.

Wow, that is impressive. Not sure of the size of the implementation but I will say we used a fourth of the resources. You don't have to invest big money to gain business value from the product. What I didn't see is the savings or ROI with the Sharepoint project. I had to the chance to have dinner with many of the IT executives at Lockheed Martin during their yearly executive conference. In no way did I walk away thinking the CIO or the leadership team were fools and could be suckered in by anyone. They were hardnosed folks focused on the business value of their investments in information technology. I have no doubt they took into consideration all the different options when moving forward with Sharepoint.

Boy I wish I was in those sessions picking apart the failed implementation methodologies. Look, reguardless of the technology or tool there will be issues and concerns you need to deal with. That being said, it's still the fastest growing product in their history. When given a choice, business users still go with Sharepoint 9 out of 10 times. And, if it wasn’t for a few governance rules that number would be much higher.

I remember reading a book on the universe when the subject of removing Pluto as a planet came up. The author basically said that the universe is a big and lonely place; we can use all of the friends we can find. In many ways I see the same thing dealing with Sharepoint. What is the point of excluding certain tools from the definition? At some point will we exclude SocialText but include Confluence? Who makes these decisions? In my opinion, Collaborative and Social Software are not competitive products but complimentary. We should focus on expanding information management, not constraining it; that would be so 1.0.

Our organization may be unique with its size but the business user has many choices. That is to say, the business user has several options in selecting a document management tool, in selecting information management solutions, and they even have several choices in collaborative applications. Although, we consumed several of our competitors last year, a few still remain. God knows, the enormous options in web content. Of course, the user also has several choices in the Social Software area as well. So, not only can the user select different product categories, they have options even within the category. That being said, there is only one "Big Dog" which makes them an easy target for those trying to move up the value chain. So, keep the criticism coming.

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Maybe I'm daft(ok, I likely am) but if Enterprise 2.0 has to do with the knowledge workers (and the collection of them in an Enterprise) Sharepoint won't serve that vision as well as it does on the "team sharing" front. There is little notion in Sharepoint (until recently) of individual contributions.

Bookmarks are in a site, not belonging to an individual. Want to share some news? Well you can post it to some Sharepoint site announcement or a blog but where do I see the aggregation of these things? Can I easily get a list of all the ppts a particular user has stored in Sharepoint? There are no tags in sharepoint to link bits of contributions across many users.

So IF the 2.0 we speak of is really individualistic as it is on the wide open web the tool needs to be written to support it. If the site or organization is front and center - instead of the individual, it misses the point. Maybe Enterprise 2.0 is all focused on business units and corporate structure (and we've certainly seen that viewpoint, I hope it isn't correct).

Your comment on the 47% figure misses an important point. File sharing is not the same as information sharing. The point I think is that 47% of organisations are using Sharepoint as a slightly more sophisticated shared drive. That's certainly been my experience, and a shared drive is not, in any meaningful sense, information sharing. Nor is it necessarily a precursor to information sharing.

March 18, 2009

Sharepoint Bites Back

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