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the Free CMSWire NewsletterWhile SharePoint has been widely successful, not all organizations have seen the full benefit of using this platform. Here is the four key element framework that I have developed for you to ensure that SharePoint becomes both a business and technical success for your organization.
SharePoint is a phenomenal success. Despite its market success, many organizations struggle to realize the full value from investments in SharePoint. For example:
- At a large central government agency, an IT led project to a SharePoint Collaboration platform was halted by another group working on a Document Management project who felt that SharePoint was a threat. The £150,000 investment only delivered a pilot.
- At an international insurance business, the use of SharePoint was crippled by disagreement between different factions in the IT function. In one project, over £500k was invested in developing a Portal application as an aggregated interface to several other systems and applications. Only 8 of 100 potential users regularly used the new portal; the remainder continued working as they had before. An investment of £2.5m in SharePoint over three years delivered no significant, widespread business benefits or financial return.
- The IT function within a global manufacturing organization deployed a SharePoint-based collaboration service. At first, the service was a huge success and enjoyed rapid adoption across the business and within months there were over 7,000 sites created. Users soon began to report difficulties in locating sites, multiple copies of documents began to appear, and the help desk was swamped with requests to recover deleted sites.
- A marketing organization reported that, “SharePoint exists in our business but no one uses it.”
Over the past five years through engagements with hundreds of organizations, I’ve developed a framework for ensuring that SharePoint becomes both a business and a technical success. This article provides a quick start introduction to the framework which consists of four key elements: Governance, Strategy, Transition and Architecture.
SharePoint Governance
Despite what anyone tells you, SharePoint Governance has got nothing at all to do with technology!
Absolutely nothing at all.
In a nutshell, SharePoint Governance aligns the use of SharePoint technologies with objectives and strategy, and defines accountability for ensuring a return on the investment.
Most of the material produced under the heading of “SharePoint Governance” is actually related to IT Operations. Does it matter if we call IT Operations, “SharePoint Governance”? Yes, because if we call operations, “Governance," then what do we call Governance? And how do we know that we are doing it?
The most successful approaches to SharePoint Governance address the relationship between Governance, Management and Operations. One way is to create three teams or groups which relate to these three levels. Figure 1 illustrates the concept:
Figure 1: A model for SharePoint Governance
The SharePoint Strategy Team are the Executive Steering committee comprising six to eight people with representation from IT, HR, and Marketing or Internal Communications. This group is accountable for the return on the investment; they set the vision and the policy. They answer the questions, “What are we trying to do?” and “Why are we doing it?” and “How will we know when we’ve done it?”
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