Great Blog Post
I wanted to take a minute to give a shout out to Dan Douglas for his excellent article “My Speech on Using Technology to Solve a Business Problem”
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Portals: Process + Praxis = Prosperity Part Deux
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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