Archive for the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ Category

The ROI of the consumerization of IT

20 Apr

Tags: IT
Posted in Case Study, Enterprise 2.0, IT | No Comments »

Embracing the Consumerization of IT (COIT) has the potential to disruptively alter your business and its position in the competitive landscape. Learn more about COIT and the considerations for adoption when determining if this shift can generate a positive return on investment for your business.

Executive Summary

There are clouds gathering on the horizon and the storm is headed in your direction. The accelerating and relentless Consumerization of IT (COIT) is heralding a disruptive change in the way organizations connect with and support customers, employees, partners and suppliers. COIT refers to the influx of consumer technologies into the enterprise such as mobile devices, social networks and cloud computing.

We observe that the COIT is causing a paradigm shift in the relationship between the business and IT. Our research shows that there is an increasing amount of pressure from the business to support the COIT and those business leaders are realistic about the inevitability of these trends. An Avanade study reports that 73% of C-level executives identify COIT as a top priority in their organization

The question business and IT leaders must ask and answer is whether there is the potential for a return on investment. We believe that while there is an inexorable march towards COIT, determining what it means to your business is crucial for making the right decisions. This is an opportunity for business and IT leaders to redefine their relationships, core competencies and to deliver better products and services to your customers.

Consumerization of IT: Introduction

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous and the convergence of personal and work computing is now upon us. The pace at which this change is occurring was unexpected and companies that embrace and exploit this change will undoubtedly be in a better position relative to their competitors. This is the result of increased agility and productivity with a corresponding decrease in costs. Somewhat surprisingly, research shows that most organizations are embracing this change despite its disruptive nature. There is a sense of inevitability as well as great opportunity.

Social networking is another key driver towards COIT. Employees are increasingly likely to leverage connections from both personal and enterprise platforms in order to make customer, employee and supplier communication more effective and timely. Employees will no longer resort to wandering the halls and riding the elevators to find the resource that can provide them with the answer they need to solve a particular problem. They will reach out through their social networks, inside or outside the firewall, to access the information they need regardless of company policy.

Cloud computing has revolutionized the way software and services are delivered to both consumers and the enterprise and is a critical pillar of IT’s consumerization. Business units of all sizes now purchase and access services on demand, often without the approval or knowledge of the IT department. Previously a business unit would have made a request to the IT department for new or changed software and waited an interminable period while navigating the maze of approvals, requirements, implementation, testing and chargebacks. Now, armed with nothing more than a credit card, an employee can purchase the service from a cloud provider for a fraction of the cost of the traditional way.

More importantly however, the Consumerization of IT is about a shifting mindset. It is a shift away from the traditional models where IT leads the technology charge to one where end users play an increasingly important role in shaping the technology landscape. It refers to a paradigm where users have a world of technology available to them at their fingertips and a willingness to use that technology in new and innovative ways – with or without approval.

Roughly every decade there is a transformative change in the technology landscape that ushers in new opportunities and challenges. Ten years ago the web enabled incredible changes to the way information was accessed and solutions were developed. The web brought with it significant challenges related to security, compatibility and the integration of legacy systems. Those that rose the challenge thrived while those that did not fell by the wayside. A decade from now we will look at the COIT in the same way.

Consumerization of IT: Opportunities

The COIT presents a series of opportunities for business to become more agile, supported by an increasingly connected and productive workforce. There are multi-faceted opportunities for cost reductions from a business and technology perspective. A secure, integrated and service-oriented technology foundation can provide increase agility while simultaneously supporting increased technical heterogeneity.

Broadly speaking, the business opportunities are illustrated in Table 1:

Table 1

Opportunity	Details
Increased business agility	· Broad and quickly growing array of simple, specialized software · Decreased implementation time for cloud solutions vs. on premises · Integrated data allows for the more rapid development and deployment of value-added business solutions. · Rapidly scale up and down as demand dictates
Increased productivity	· Employees able to work from anywhere at any time · Increasing channels to connect with customers, partners, suppliers and fellow employees · Increased morale and satisfaction
Cost Reduction	· Shifting the cost burden for mobile devices from employer to employee · Reduced travel expenses · Cost reduction for cloud solutions vs. traditional enterprise packages · Increasingly mobile workforce can result in decreased operational expenses such as office space and communications infrastructure
Redefining IT	· A redefinition of the role of IT · A sharper focus on the services and capabilities IT delivers · A move from services from behind the firewall to the cloud · Moving towards a service-oriented architecture paradigm

Consumerization of IT: Costs

Clearly the Consumerization of IT is not a change that will drive improved business performance at little to no cost. There are serious challenges and associated costs that need to be identified and overcome in order to successfully adapt to these changes. The costs from an IT perspective are outlined in Table 2:

Table 2

Cost	Details
Technology	· Virtualization technologies to provide secure access to enterprise systems · Architecting solutions to focus more strategically on service orientation · Implementation of mobile device management (MDM) solutions
Security	· More complex security infrastructure required · Ongoing risk assessment & evaluation of new devices · Increased emphasis on data security
Management	· More diverse technical landscape to support · Creation of data governance frameworks · Development & implementation of policies and processes
Licensing	· Potential for increased costs for per-device licensing

Consumerization of IT: Factors in Determining ROI

We articulated in Tables 1 and 2 that there are benefits and costs associated with the Consumerization of IT which leads the challenge of determining the ROI. Admittedly, the ROI of COIT is still not fully understood but the following section will provide guidance on the areas that you can measure to make an accurate determination of ROI. The following list describes these areas with some relevant metrics. This list is not intended to be exhaustive but rather to provide sample metrics that can form the basis of determining the ROI for your organization:

1. Business Agility – refers to the ability of a business to adapt rapidly and cost effectively to changes in the business environment. How effective your business is at identifying and seizing new opportunities will determine your success in the marketplace. Understanding your current capabilities from both an execution and cost perspective will allow you to objectively measure improvements gained by embracing the COIT as a business strategy.

a. Profitability

b. Time to Market

c. Product Development Costs

d. Cost of Change

2. Customer Satisfaction – the COIT provides myriad opportunities to leverage new channels for connecting with customers including the web, mobile, social networks and the cloud. A well-executed CRM strategy that leverages these advances will result in increased levels of customer satisfaction and retention thereby driving increased business. Diligently measuring customer satisfaction will provide valuable insight into the effectives of your strategies.

a. Customer Retention Rate

b. Customer Complaints

c. Complaint Resolution Time

d. Revenue per Customer

3. Employee Productivity – can be measured in the quality and timeliness of employee outputs. Effectively understanding employee productivity is an important goal for organizations as it will allow them to better determine the level of business value being created. The COIT has the potential to increase employee productivity by allowing employees to be connected to the right data and people anywhere and at any time. Devising effective metrics to track employee productivity is essential for determining the effectives of your COIT strategy.

a. Units of work produced in a given time period

b. Quality of work

c. Utilization

d. Availability

e. Employee morale/satisfaction

4. Technology Costs – Information Technology is a very capital intensive part of your business. The opportunity for savings here are twofold. Shifting the cost of mobile devices from the employer to employee is an opportunity to reduce costs. Using the cloud to deliver business solutions can lead to cost reductions and also increase the business value generated by IT by focusing on a more clearly defined set of competencies. Identifying where the IT budget is spent and strategically reorienting that spending towards supporting business priorities such as COIT will yield improved IT value to the business. It is important to note that while overall technology costs may not be reduced they will be more effectively targeted.

a. Infrastructure/Hardware Costs

b. Licensing Costs

c. Governance Costs

d. Mobility Costs

e. Time to Market

f. New development vs. maintenance effort

The combination of these metrics into a performance scorecard will enable you to accurately understand the ROI of COIT for your organization. When you undertake pilot project(s) you will be in a position to objectively assess the results of your efforts.

Recommendations

1. Embrace the change. This change is inevitable and is already well underway. The costs and effort involved with attempting to put halt its momentum would be better focused on how to manage and take advantage of these new models. Employees that are always connected and embracing the newest technologies can drive increased productivity and better business results.

2. Start Small, Assess and Expand. Do not panic and initiate a wholesale restructuring of your organization. Identify your current pain points and select pilot projects that you can manage, measure and implement. Take a holistic view of these segments of the enterprise from a business, strategy and technology perspectives and chart a path forward with COIT in mind. This may involve a strategic review of a particular business unit and the relevant business processes. Identify communication channels and identify opportunities for improvement. Examine the underlying technology from the perspective of the cloud, service orientation, security, data and mobile connectivity.

3. Redefine the role of IT. IT departments are no longer the sole decision makers when it comes to technology in an organization. Users are adopting new technologies and circumventing IT departments at an increasing rate. This presents IT departments with an opportunity to evolve their core mission and services. Shifting the focus from monolithic systems to service-oriented architectures and seamless integration between both on premises and cloud offerings will create significant business value.

4. Focus on data, not devices. Devices will clearly continue to change rapidly. Focusing exclusively on the assessment and approval of mobile devices is a Sisyphean task. Ensuring that data is secure, available and integrated is the more important challenge to be undertaken. Identifying key information and classifying it in the context of business criticality and security is the first step in the process in determining which devices to support.

5. Create a mobile strategy. It’s critical to recognize that a clearly defined mobile strategy can help drive business growth. You must identify how your business reaches customers, connects with partners and suppliers and enables employees. The results will form the basis of how your business does everything from marketing and customer support to determining how and what software is purchased or built. Data that once resided solely behind the firewall must now also be securely available on mobile devices and in the cloud.

References

Avanade. (n.d.). Global Survey: Dispelling Six Myths of Consumerization of IT. Retrieved from Avanade: http://www.avanade.com/Documents/Resources/consumerization-of-it-executive-summary.pdf

Business Agility. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_agility

CA.com. (n.d.). Retrieved from Consumer Driven IT: Are You Ready?: http://community.ca.com/blogs/cdit/archive/2012/02/24/consumer-driven-it-gets-serious.aspx

Consumerization of IT. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumerization

Dell. (n.d.). CIO Strategies for Consumerization:. Retrieved from Dell: http://marketing.dell.com/Global/FileLib/hp_microsite/dell-consumerization.pdf

Gruman, G. (n.d.). BYOD: You ain’t seen nothing yet. Retrieved from Infoworld: http://www.infoworld.com/t/byod/byod-you-aint-seen-nothing-yet-182028?page=0,0

Hinchcliffe, D. (n.d.). Consumerization of tech: the new enterprise disruptor. Retrieved from ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/consumerization-of-tech-the-new-enterprise-disruptor/1978?tag=search-results-rivers;item2

Microsoft. (n.d.). The Consumerization of IT Within Microsoft from the CIO’s Perspective. Retrieved from Microsoft: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh867769.aspx

Mobile Device Managment. (n.d.). Retrieved from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_device_management

Schadler, T. (n.d.). How consumerization drives innovation. Retrieved from ZDNet: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/forrester/how-consumerization-drives-innovation/670

Scott, T. (n.d.). Balancing Productivity and Risk is Key to Consumerization of IT. Retrieved from Microsoft: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/mscio/archive/2011/08/30/balancing-productivity-and-risk-is-key-to-consumerization-of-it.aspx

Unisys. (n.d.). Unisys. Retrieved from 2011 Consumerization of IT Study: Closing the “Consumerization Gap”: http://www.unisys.com/unisys/common/download.jsp?d_id=1120000970016710178&backurl=/unisys/ri/report/detail.jsp&id=1120000970016710178

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My SPC 09 Calendar

14 Oct

Tags: SharePoint
Posted in Conferences, Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »

Here’s my schedule for the upcoming SharePoint conference. I’ll also be live blogging for End User SharePoint which I am really looking forward to.

Monday, October 19th, 2009
9:00 AMKeynote: Unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010
Mandalay Bay BallroomSpeaker: Steve Ballmer

10:30 AMKeynote: Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Drilldown
Mandalay Bay BallroomSpeaker: Jeff Teper

1:15 PMEnterprise Search Overview
Islander GSpeaker: Evan Richman

2:45 PMECM for the Masses – How SharePoint 2010 delivers on the promise
Lagoon HSpeaker: Ryan Duguid

4:30 PMOverview of Social Computing in SharePoint 2010
South Seas DSpeaker: Christian Finn

Tuesday, October 20th, 2009
9:00 AMWhat’s New in Business Connectivity Services (Evolution of BDC!)
South Seas BSpeaker: Michal Gideoni

10:30 AMScaling SharePoint 2010 topologies for your organization
Mandalay Bay FSpeaker: Simon Skaria, Umesh Unnikrishnan

1:15 PMSharePoint Document Management Deep Dive
Mandalay Bay KSpeaker: Ryan Duguid

2:45 PMOffice 2007 vs. Office 2010 – Deployment Considerations
Breakers BSpeaker: Chris Bortlik

4:30 PMContinental Airlines: Architecting Enterprise Content Management -…
Breakers ESpeaker: Benjamin Lee, Denise Wilson, Jason Deere

Wednesday, October 21th, 2009
9:00 AMSharePoint 2010 Governance: Planning and Implementation
Mandalay Bay GSpeaker: Scott Jamison, Susan Hanley

10:30 AMConfiguring and Deploying a Reporting Environment in SharePoint…
Mandalay Bay KSpeaker: Prash Shirolkar, Thierry D’hers

1:15 PMOverview of Content Acquisition for Search in SharePoint 2010
ReefSpeaker: Siddharth Shah

2:45 PMSolving Information Chaos: Advanced Content Processing with FAST…
Lagoon JSpeaker: Sven Arne Gylterud

4:30 PMSocial Search in SharePoint 2010
Mandalay Bay HSpeaker: Jessica Alspaugh

Thursday, October 22th, 2009
9:00 AMUnveiling New Management Tools for Administering SharePoint 2010
South Seas BSpeaker: Zach Rosenfield

10:30 AMDeep Dive into SharePoint 2010 Profile Store and Profile Data…
Mandalay Bay GSpeaker: Chris Gideon, Tanuj Bansal

12:00 PMForm-driven Mashups Using InfoPath and Forms Services 2010
Mandalay Bay JSpeaker: Nick Dallett

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SharePoint Blogs as a Communication Mechanism

21 Sep

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint
Posted in Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

As those of you who read this blog periodically know, I work for a large, global manufacturing company. As part of the rebranding effort of our MOSS 2007 implementation many of our senior executives have started blogging. This provides another medium for them to converse with the peeps as it were. At the outset their intention was to create a two way dialog with our employees and take some intial steps to embrace the world of Enterprise 2.0. I would say that while it has been somewhat successful, but it has not met expectations. I have some ideas as to why and some solutions but am very interested in the feedback of those who have enjoyed a successful blogging initiative.

This great article by Joel Olsen triggered gave me some excellent food for thought to ponder this situation: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=0cd1a63d%2D183c%2D4fc2%2D8320%2Dba5369008acb&ID=253

Here are some of the issues that I see as an obstacle to success.

Corporate Culture – ours is an organizationally decentralized company. While we have made great strides in improving communication and collaboration over the past 1o years some of that institutional memory lingers.
Lack of Governance – clear governance needs to be defined on acceptable blogging and commenting policies. This will provide clarity to people about expectations and give them some certainty on how to ensure their comment is published.
User Profile Data – While this isn’t necessarily related to blogging it is critical in order to extend MOSS from a communication and collaboration tool to a platform for connecting people. This shift in my view will drive people to the portal as part of their day to day activities and increase the opportunity for users to read and interact with blogs. This is difficult in a decentralized organization like ours because the responsibility for populating AD with accurate information lies with the individual manufacturing facilities.
Latency – I see this as a major issue. When people take the time to post a comment it needs to be reviewed and approved within a reasonable period of time. Currently when they post it “disappears” into the ether and will only show up once approved. There then is a further delay in waiting for a response. We are looking at implementing a simple “Thumbs Up” mechanism so people can immediately give feedback on content. We discussed a ranking system or even having a Thumbs Down option but have decided at this point in the evolution of our Enterprise 2.0 initiative that we want to encourage positive feedback and leave more comprehensive and potentially negative feedback for the comment mechanism.
Metrics – the only way you can know if any initiative is successful is to define measurements and success criteria and then….wait for it…measure them. The problem with OTB SharePoint usage statistics is that they absolutely do not provide you with enough information to make informed judgments about whether what you are doing is working. In our situation our executives typically post new blogs on Mondays.
1. We initially created a graph for each blog showing number of hits and distinct users for the last 30 days. This was helpful in the sense that it showed us both usage trends over time and confirmed that there was a spike in traffic 1-2 days after the blog was posted.
2. We then linked the SharePoint usage data to our main application database to show how many distinct users per month from each manufacturing facility were visiting the blogs. Interesting, but not overly useful.
3. We are now looking at metrics that will require some proactivity on the part of the blog admins but should prove more useful. Breaking down the metrics by week to coincide more closely with the posting cycle. And then doing some research to understand the effectiveness of the blog? If a blogger highlights a certain facility for great work they did, the traffic from that facility should increase if the message is getting across. Or if a blog is posted focused on a specific major customer of ours the ideal outcome would be that all facilities dealing with or hoping to win business from that customer would be drawn to the blog post. If not, there is a problem. But you can’t know if you don’t measure it.
4. Average length of time to approve and respond to a blog comment. In my view there should be an SLA around this. I personally would not want to have a conversation with someone that took a week to respond.
5. As I highlighted in a previous blog entry we have wired up a DVWP to a SQL query to highlight blog comments and their current status to make it easier for approvers to see if there are any new entries that need review. We have also encouraged them to set up alerts on their Comments lists.
6. A quick tip that many people don’t know is that by appending “_layouts/usagedetails.aspx” to the end of your site URL you are able to see different usage metrics. You wil be able to see for example a list of users by day that have accessed your site. This can be helpful in understanding who is accessing your blogs and when and will allow you to get a sense of who is reading each post. Again – it’s not perfectly accurate but tied with the other metrics you can start to get a good picture of who is conuming the content.
7. SharePoint Designer also has some usage reporting that you can use. If you open a site and select the Site > Reports >Usage option you can see the reports that you can take a look at.
Exposing Content – we have a site called Blog Central and each blog is a subsite of that. We currently roll up the latest blog entries using the CQWP. The issue with that is the fact that the Blog Central site is still a click away from the home page. We are looking at a revamp of our homepage to leverage the CQWP and JQuery to in order to maximize the use of space and allow users to more easily see what is new. We are also looking at rolling up the comments to a more prominent central location in order to highlight the fact that there is dialogue taking place. Currently comments are only accessible by looking at the bottom of specific blog posts which makes it cumbersome for the users.

I hope you find this information helpful and most importantly I am interested in any feedback on your own experiences.

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Give me a Tax Free Folkswagen..or a a hybrid

02 Aug

Tags: Folksonomy, Metadata, Semantic Web, Taxonomy, Web 2.0
Posted in Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking, along with many others, about the relative merit of taxonomies and folksonomies in the corporate environment. Would you derive more value by spending effort creating a detailed taxonomy for your information environment or would you be better off letting the users categorize content by tagging that content thereby creating a folksonomy? Or perhaps a hybrid solution where a shared vocabulary is used to as the basis of your content tagging effort.

Since I am currently working with MOSS 2007 forgive me if I use some MOSS specific terms throughout this post.

Obviously there are benefits and drawbacks to both and their relative merits can be dictated by the situation. I wouldn’t personally want to be perusing for medical information on heart medication and be mislead into thinking a laxative fell into that category because someone thought that would be funny – although I’m certainly not above seeing the humour there.

First let’s understand some relevant terms. It would be a terrible irony if we didn’t define these terms considering the topic of this post. Or would it?

Taxonomy: is the practice of classifying things. The Duey Decimal system comes to mind In the context of this article it is the creation of meta-data structures to organize and classify content. The structure is often hierarchical and really represents an attempt to create a shared vocabulary. I work in a manufacturing company and and example of a sample taxonomy can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxonomy_of_manufacturing_processes

Folksonomy: A non-hierarchical collection of user generated terms used to describe content. Think tag cloud. The word is a portmanteau of “folk” and “taxonomy. Sorry – I found that lovely French word while researching this post and felt like I had to include it.

Precision: In the context of document retrieval, precision is the percentage of retrieved documents that are relevant to the search. It’s a measure of exactness.

Recall: The number of relevant documents that were returned in a search versus the amount that should have been returned.

Semantics: the study of meaning. Or in other words, there may be a semantic gap between your perception and your boss’ intentions when he tells you that as a manager this place could run just fine without you.

Metadata – data about data. Or in other words, descriptive data about specific content (author, file size, owner etc.)

Here is a quick table illustrating providing an overview of taxonomies and folksonomies. Credit goes to Mark Baartse from useyourweb.com for the information: http://www.useyourweb.com/blog/?p=62

Taxonomy	Folksonomy
Brittle	Flexible
Accurate (if done well)	Less reliable
Compliance must be forced	Rewards but doesn’t force compliance
Harder to add to	Easy to add to
Centrally controlled	Democratically controlled
Predictable	Organic
Higher Precision	Higher Recall

There is a very interesting article below that describes the semantic gap between expert curators & laypeople in describing and categorizing artwork. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/8/arts/artsspecial/28social.html?_r=2&oref=slogin. I think in a decentralized, global organization like my current employer that this situation illustrates perfectly the difficulties in implementing a comprehensive taxonomy.

Consider the situations many organizations find themselves in. A global organization working with numerous languages and cultures composed of numerous functional areas and levels that is sharing information with customers and suppliers. Add in a decentralized operating structure along with a sprinkle of rather ad-hoc document management practices and the challenges of implementing a taxonomy that will add any value start to become quite clear. There is a lot of leg-work do to organizationally prior to even considering a technology solution.

“Can we all agree on what a “part” is? What about a customer? What about an HR policy? Most of the time we can’t agree where to go for lunch. And hey! All our ERP solutions are implemented differently anyway. Shouldn’t we spend 10 years doing that prior to doing this? And that guy from Iowa is a jerk anyway so there is no way I’m working with him. I’m hungry…about that lunch…”

Incrementally implementing a simple taxonomy that can leverage the enterprise search features of MOSS is straightforward and requires agreement of a smaller group of people.

In scenarios like this I have started to lean much more towards the use of folksonomies. It’s far simpler to implement, content editors have been open to the idea that they can “tag” things and it shows up in a cool tag cloud on the home page. Plus it seems very trendy and Web 2.0.

In fact I have to include an image of one of the first that we implemented. It figures that the most prominent word would be Die. Just my luck.

Obviously this is fraught with the typical perils of user generated tagging but in our situation the content authors are reasonably well-trained. They are not that likely to imput something malicious. They might input something that makes no sense to someone else but that’s part of the process. It’s a hell of a lot easier to modify a tag than it is to make a change to your taxonomy. In fact, and this is very important, I see a real opportunity for a folksonomy to drive a more structured effort at creating a taxonomy over time. It will provide us with a glimpse into how the people that use the content perceive that same content.

The important thing to remember is that this approach provides content consumers with a new mechanism for finding the information that they are looking for. It is complimentary to Enterprise Search. There are numerous free tagging solutions for MOSS 2007 available at codeplex and it will be included in SharePoint 2010 out of the box.

The major limitation I see with this approach is the lackof a semi-structured contextual shared vocabulary. I’m referring to a way to provide content creators with contextual tagging suggestions based on the content they are trying to describe. If you take a look at my short post regarding OpenCalais you’ll get an idea of what I am referring to: http://www.intelligenceamong.us/?p=350.

When I think of a hybrid solution this is what I am referring to and the potential power of the Semantic Web or Web 3.0 or whatever we’ll be calling it in a few years. Imagine if content creators were able to filter their content through an engine or services that looked at the contents and was able to determine relationships, people, events, facts etc. about the content and return suggestions that made sense. The instances of incoherent or irrelevant tags would drop significantly. Based on what I have seen with OpenCalais, we are going to look at creating a prototype that integrates with their service to assist content creators with creating a reasonable folksonomy.

In summary, taxonomies and folksonomies are complimentary to one another and will faciliate your understanding of your information from a variety of perspectives. Nothing is static and gathering as much information as organically as possible will assist the evolution of the classification system that you choose. Adding semantic capabilities to your content tagging effort can make your folksonomy even more relevant. Good luck.

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SharePoint Governance – A practical methodology

26 Jun

Tags: Business Focus, IT, Technology
Posted in Enterprise 2.0, IT, SharePoint | 1 Comment »

Look for a post over the next few days around how to manage the process of implementing a practical governance model. I’ve learned a lot and am eager to share. I’m a very pragmatic person and believe that context – in the form of corporate culture, engagement, strategic direction (or lack thereof) – should be a primary consideration in developing a governance model. Stay tuned.

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Portals: Process + Praxis = Prosperity Part Deux

19 May

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, IT, Web 2.0
Posted in Conferences, Enterprise 2.0, IT, SharePoint | 1 Comment »

For part 1 of these article please go here.

I want to take a moment to finish part 2 of this article. It’s a simple concept but often overlooked for a variety of reasons. The main idea is that whatever value you are trying to deliver through SharePoint will be so much more successful if it is part of an effective business process. Wikipedia defines a business process as: “A business process or business method collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers.”

In our organization, defining and improving business processes is often taken as, “These geeks in IT are just trying to give us a bunch of homework to do so they don’t have to do anything themselves.”

An example came up the other day regarding Cost Savings. In these turbulent economic times it goes without saying that most organizations are focused heavily on finding efficiencies throughout their company. So, in my world that means – “We need a SharePoint site to track cost savings.” Let’s not even delve into the idea of whether SharePoint is the right solution upon which to build this solution at the moment. After discussion with a non-IT SharePoint “expert” it was boiled down to the fact they didn’t need a site, they needed a list.

The users were sold that this was the ticket to successfully tracking cost savings and off they went. To date their have been 4 cost savings ideas entered – all by the guy that owns the list and all over a month ago. About the level of “success” that could be expected.

I got involved shortly before they went live in order to have a fresh set of eyes look at the situation. The idea was that this was going to be a spot that people would flock to over time to share their cost savings ideas for the benefit of the company. I told them flat out that as it stood this was guaranteed to fail and they hadn’t given it near enough thought. They took it like champs.

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Portals: Process + Praxis = Prosperity

13 Apr

Tags: Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0
Posted in Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | 1 Comment »

Click here for Part 2.

One of the insights I share with people that are implementing SharePoint and/or an Enterprise Social Computing strategy is that just because you build it does not mean that they are coming. Your people are used to working, communicating and collaborating in specific ways and there needs to be a compelling reason for them to change. In my experience, an important aspect of the human condition is that to varying degrees people are motivated by naked self-interest. Myself? Guilty as charged. How does an organization overcome the “So What” factor when launching their new portal platform that will have a “transformative impact on how we do business?” I will now pause so you can collectively yawn.

To drive the success of an initiative or initiatives like this an organization needs to ask themselves a few very important questions:

What are the problems we are trying to solve. Sounds simple but losing focus on that simple questions will lead you down a path of misery and that flushing sound is your EBIT going down the toilet.
What are the business processes, across functional areas, that will support this initiative?
What are the motivators that will get people to change their behaviour?

Today I’ll focus on “The Problem” and will cover the others in future posts.

What is the problem?

Let’s first discuss some examples of what are NOT problems

“We need an intranet” is not a problem.
“We need a spot where people can collaborate” is not a problem
“We should do this because our competitors are probably doing it” is not a problem
“Those geeks in IT installed this stupid thing 2 years ago and since we’re stuck with it now we might as well do something with it” is a problem but is unrelated to the topic at hand.
“We just signed an EA with Microsoft which will allow us to legitimately use the functionality we’ve been using illegally up until now” is also an unrelated problem.

Here are some problems (obviously simplified in the interest of dealing with my short attention span)

We have lost 10 million dollars in new business to our competitors by not having a standardized quoting process.
We are getting sued 4 times a month because different versions of our ice cream subsidization policy are floating around throughout the enterprise.
Our Active Directory contains 1500 unique roles throughout the organization. We need a standardized list in order to support our Succession Planning strategy.
Training a new hire in the Purchasing department currently takes 2 months and 60 hours of mentoring by a current employee

Problems and the resultant objectives have to be measurable or else you’ll never have any idea if you have achieved success. There are a lot of examples on-line about creating effective problem statements so I won’t delve into it any further.

The main point I want to make is spend time upfront defining what the problem you are actually trying to solve is – and do not lose focus on it. Do NOT let consultants sell you on how great things could be if you just also did X, Y and Z. Base your requirements and objectives on the problem you are trying to solve.

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Enterprise Social Computing

10 Apr

Tags: Business Focus, Enterprise 2.0, Social Networking, Technology, Web 2.0
Posted in Enterprise 2.0, SharePoint, Social Networking, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Being a part of a large, global manufacturing company that is at the cusp of embracing the wonderful world of Enterprise 2.0 is an interesting place to be. There is a strong desire by a few top executives to jump on the bandwagon – although they are not exactly clear why at this point. I am a believer in the potential of ESC but also wary about how and why to implement some of these technologies and potentially radical changes to an organizations culture. I’ve taken a few minutes and identified some of the focus areas that make sense if you are going to take a stab at this whole ESC thing.

One thing I highly recommend is to not overpromise about the transformative effects of ESC and how it will do everything from mitigating the risk of retiring boomers to providing a culture that Generation Z (or whatever the hell they are called at the moment) will feel instantly at home in. Start a pilot with a narrow focus, a defined timeline and measurable objectives – and take it from there.

Below I’ve listed some of the ideas that an organization might want to consider when embarking on the ESC journey. I’ve detailed some approaches to increasing and managing the level of user involvement in your network.

1. Governance
a. Clearly published codes of content, IT acceptable use policies etc. If you are going to throw the doors wide-open people need to be very clear on what they can and can’t do. Things that would get you canned will get you canned if you do them on the companies social network.

2. Profiles
a. Encourage everyone to update their profiles including their picture.
b. Figure out what data you have available in your corporate Active Directory (or whatever you use) and define standards throughout the organization. I won’t even bother telling you how many distinct roles and departments are defined in ours.

3. Enterprise Search
a. Be very cautious of encouraging the generation of unstructured content when no plan is in place for managing our structured content.
b. Consistently working together to identify the language of your company across all functional areas – in SharePoint terms this is related to Content Typing but for it to really work we need to review it portal-wide. From a Robot to an HR policy, it’s important that they are defined as consistently as possible across the organization
c. Tune the search on an ongoing basis by :
i. Reviewing the most commonly used search terms
ii. Tuning the relevancy of search results
iii. Grouping like terms. If someone types in training then they are likely looking for content on the PDT site.
iv. Semantic search tuning. If someone types in “Die” they are more likely looking for Die Standards then someone’s blog post about his goldfish dying.

4. Tagging
User generated tagging for content uploaded into the system. This facilitates search in a very organic way. Allowing tagging is a simple way to allow users to interact with your system in a way that can enhance the experience for all users

5. Content Rating
A mechanism for users to rate content on the system. Another simple way to encourage user participation and weed out what content really sucks on your social network.

6. Hall of Fame
a. I love this idea as it helps personalize the participants in your network and publicizes the local heroes. A publicly visible page that shows:
i. The user with the most page hits across the portal
ii. The user who has uploaded the most content (although this may or may not be a good thing)
iii. The user with the most blog comments
iv. The user with the highest rated content
v. Most “-pedia” entries

7. “Insert Company Here” – pedia. This is simple in concept and potentially simple in execution. The value of this is that it brings together the key information that might normally be dispersed all over the place, into one location. Feel free to name is something other than a name ending in “pedia” which is getting about as tired as attaching “gate” to the end of every scandal.

8. Expert Search
a. Create a profile property called Area of Expertise
b. Create a custom search called Expert Search that will search that profile information to find the right person.
c. This will encourage the non-deadbeats to step up and identify themselves, thereby making their talents more accessible to the organization.

9. Reward System for encouraging participation
a. Of course we all know that money talks but so does public recognition of a job well done

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Archive for the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ Category

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