The Art of SharePoint Success: Strategy - SharePoint as an Information & Knowledge Management Infrastructure

By Symon Garfield (@symon_garfield) Dec 15, 2011

This is article seven in the series exploring the Art of SharePoint Success, a framework for achieving long term business benefits from investments in SharePoint-based change initiatives.

There are four elements to the framework:

Governance
Strategy
Architecture
Transition

We are discussing the strategy element which began with the question, “What is SharePoint?” I suggested the following answer: SharePoint is a set of integrated technologies which provide a platform upon which an organization can build a flexible, long-term information and knowledge management infrastructure. The past two articles have explored the concepts of SharePoint as a set of integrated technologies, as an application development platform and the nature of infrastructure. This month we are going to wrap up the definition of SharePoint by looking at the idea that SharePoint is all about information and knowledge management.

Information and Knowledge Management

Peter Drucker said,

To make knowledge work productive will be the great management challenge of this century; just as to make manual work productive was the great management task of the last century.. The productivity of knowledge and knowledge workers will not be the only competitive factor in the world economy. It is however likely to become the decisive factor, at least for most industries in developed countries” (Drucker 1992)

Avoiding an esoteric discussion on the differences between information and knowledge , the management of information and knowledge are fundamental to the performance and competitiveness of all most every modern business. It’s about getting the right information (or knowledge), to the right people, in the right format, and at the right time in order to help them do their jobs.

The Information Workplace and What You Need to Build One

In 2005, analysts at Forrester Research Inc. coined the term “Information Workplace”, a vision of the workplace of the future for information workers. They describe the information workplace in terms of seven tenants.

Table 1: Seven tenants of the information workplace (Driver and Moore 2007)

To realize the vision of the information workplace an organization needs a technical platform that provides the following set of capabilities:

content management
collaboration and communication
portal framework
pervasive business intelligence
office productivity
search
human-centric business process management
information rights management

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar?

Strategic Choices

In selecting a technology platform upon which to build an information workplace, you have three basic choices:

Select best of breed products for each area and integrate them
Select a unified infrastructure that delivers the breadth of capabilities
Hybrid

Option 1 has the benefit of delivering best of breed functionality across all capabilities, but do you really need the best? On the downside, the IT function has to maintain several different technologies from different vendors who may all have different strategies and roadmaps for their products, integration can be difficult, costly and time consuming, and for the users, learning several different technologies can be a barrier to adoption.

Option 2 has the benefit of lower costs as a single license and technology platform delivers the breadth of capabilities, integration is simpler, and users only have one technology to adopt. Of course it would be very useful if the selected platform integrated seamlessly with your personal productivity tools, and if there were complimentary cloud, mobile and web-based technologies available, even better. On the downside, the single platform may not have the same depth of functionality as the best in breed products, and you may prefer not to put all your eggs in one technology vendor's basket.