The Art of SharePoint Success: Strategic Lenses - Knowledge Mgt, Intranets & Value

By Symon Garfield (@symon_garfield) Dec 20, 2011

This week in the Art of SharePoint Success it's time to talk Strategic Lenses (aka "what do I do with SharePoint?") — specifically Value and Knowledge Management. Let's take a closer look.

This is article number eight in the series discussing the Art of SharePoint Success, a framework for ensuring that organizations generate a long term, measurable return on their investment in SharePoint. There are four elements to the framework:

Governance
Strategy
Architecture
Transition

We are currently discussing the strategy element and have spent the past few articles answering the question, “What is SharePoint?” Over the next two articles we are moving on to consider a number of different strategic lenses that I use to help clients form their strategy, or answer the question, “What should I do with SharePoint?” We’re going to use the following strategic lenses:

Value
Knowledge Management
Intranet
Enterprise Content Management
Collaboration

Value

How is value defined in your organization? Where is value created in your organization? Answering these two questions is a great start in developing your SharePoint strategy.

For example, in 2009 I worked with a UK public sector agency that was investigating how they could use SharePoint. We soon identified cost reduction as a strategic driver. But which costs? Case handling turned out to be the core business process within the organization, and the teams of highly paid lawyers and economists that handled the cases were a significant cost center. Investigation into the working practices of the lawyers revealed familiar problems relating to the use of email and file shares for collaboration and document management. The decision was made to develop a prototype to demonstrate how a SharePoint based solution could improve the core case handling process and improve the productivity of the lawyers.

SharePoint is about information and knowledge management, so begin by understanding value and how and where it is created in your organization and then examine the role of information and knowledge in creating value. This is one of the many reasons why I implore clients not to start by piloting SharePoint in the IT function — typically the IT department is not perceived by the rest of the organization as a high value center. Targeting value centers helps to ensure early returns on your investment and provides high visibility of success which helps drive demand and adoption. Careful though! You don’t want a highly visible failed project.

Knowledge Management

If your organization has a strategic focus on knowledge management, then SharePoint provides you with the set of tools that you can use to implement your strategy, plus knowledge management gives us food for thought in developing a SharePoint strategy.

There are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge which can be codified, perhaps as documents, process maps or calculations; and implicit or tacit knowledge, which is experienced-based and can’t easily be codified. Understanding which of these two types of knowledge are associated with the value creation in your organization can help to shape your SharePoint strategy. SharePoint facilitates the management of explicit knowledge through search and content management. Strategies for the management of tacit knowledge are likely to include SharePoint’s social features including MySite, blogs and people search.