Intelligence Among Us

You are under the gun and need to get information published about your 40+ operational units before your SharePoint rebranding goes live. You need the same information about every unit, which in this case is their Expertise, Services and Equipment. You wipe the sweat off your brow, or elsewhere, but we won’t get into that. You consider the options and decide that you are going to either create a new page layout or simply create a site and save it as a template and recreate the rest from it. Since you have the content you need you decide that you are simply going to use the Content Editor Web Part to display it. It works and you are golden.

The portal is relaunched and people browse around the new content – once. Your boss asks you, “This information is great. What can we do with it?” Your response of, “Not a hell of a lot” is not well received.  You leave early and drink yourself to sleep.

Let me suggest an alternative approach. Since each operational unit has a site and those sites all reside in the same site collection, content types and the Content Query web part are an excellent solution that can acheive the same presentation requirements while providing the ability to centrally manage the information and use it more effectively.

In this case we can create 3 content types (Equipment, Expertise, Service) that correspond with the information we need to capture.  We’ll keep the default Title field and add another for Operational Unit Name.

At this point you can create a list and associate those content types to it.  Click here for a detailed explanation of content types.

 
We’ll add an entry for each content type for our fictitious Operational Unit 1.

We are now in a position to be able to create the site, page or whatever is required for our new Operational Unit.  Keep in mind that in order to use the Content Query web part the SharePoint publishing infrastructure must be enabled by activating the feature.

Once the site is created we can drag add 3 Content Query web parts to the page.  We need to use three in this case to achieve the standards set for the presentation/look and feel.  For the purposes of this blog I’ll add 1. 

You can see here that we are able specify the content type we want to display and we are able to filter the results to show only those items that are associated with Operational Unit 1.

The Content Query web part provides rich opportunities to customize the look and feel of the results by changing the XSL stylesheets in the style library.  That’s definitely a topic for another post but suffice it to say you have a lot of options to make it look purdy.

Workflows can be associated with the content types we have created and of course the regular SharePoint permissions apply to our Master Overview list so that we can delegate responsiblity for managing the Services, Expertise and Equipment to a key person at each operational unit if desired.

We also now have the ability to look at that master list and use it for our advantage.  If someone wants to see all divisions that are experts in a specific kind of stamping we can.  If we add more metadata such as Region we can obviously get more granular in how we look at the information.  We could then use this master list to start to associate specific people with areas of expertise to further enable people to find the people that can help them more quickly.

In conclusion, I have attempted to show you a different way of using some of the out of the box features of SharePoint to achieve your presentation requirements while giving you the ability to centrally manage key data and use it for a broader suite of business purposes.

Consider the following situation that many people, teams and businesses find themselves in.   You have a large set of related documents in which critical business decisions are made.   You have no processes in place to deal with capture, approval, disposition etc.  You are using a windows file share to manage these documents with which results in issues with security, versioning, finding the one version of the truth, searching and all the associated problems that go along with this semi-structured approach.

SharePoint provides excellent functionality out of the box to deal with these types of situations.  The question you need to ask yourself is how can I deliver the value the most quickly in the context of the current situation. 

I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about Content Types in SharePoint as they are not germane to the specific scenario I will talking about in this article.  An overview of content types can be found here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms472236.aspx.  Suffice it to say that a content types allow you to specifiy the metadata and behaviours of content in a reusable way across your site collection.  They also provide the power to truly bring your enterprise search alive.

The situation I was presented with last week was the following:  Our team that is responsible for global contracts and services currently manages the Global Contracts documents in SharePoint (in a list) and “manages” the supporting Service related documentation in a Windows file share.  There is a two way 1-n relationship between Global Contracts and Services.  So in other words, there may be one or many Services related to a Global Contract as well as one or many Global Contracts related to a service.   There are none of the processes I briefly covered in the first paragraph defined and there is also very little in the way of standards templates and standard document sets that are associated with a service.  There is also a fairly complex folder structure used to manage these documents which is resulting in a lack of clarity about where to put what which ends up with multiple versions of the same document being stored.

Querying the user about what they need indicated the following initial requirements:

1. We need to be able to simplify the storage of these documents so there are less chances to make mistakes
2. Organize documents by Service
3. Categorize and view documents by document type
4. Categorize and view documents by vendor
5. Be able to see what global contracts are related to a service that we are working on.
6. I need to be able to work on drafts and publish the final version

Clearly, this team is not at the point of even considering the more sophisticated options that SharePoint brings to the table. I thought back to a simple but effective technique demonstrated on a webcast by Dux Sy last month: http://sp.meetdux.com/archive/2009/05/15/how-to-emulate-network-shares-in-a-sharepoint-document-library.aspx

Here’s what we did:

1. Firstly we created a few lists that will be shared between the Global Contracts and Services libraries.  One was to store a central list of services and the other was to store a list of Vendors.   Keep in mind that this data could be exposed from an LOB through the BDC however they are not licensed for Enterprise and regardless there is no back end system that houses this data anyway.

2. We then created a document library called Services that had the following columns:   Service Name (lookup from the Service List), Vendor Name (lookup from the Vendor list with the option of selecting multiple options) and Document Type (choice which included Form, Proposal, Financial Analysis, Misc. etc.).

3. We then added a lookup column to the Global Contracts list that will allow selecting multiple values from the Service Name list.

4. We created a Web Part Page that will show both the Services and Global Contracts lists categorized by by Service to allow for easy reference between the two.

5. Turned Major and Minor versioning on for the Services list to allow for the publishing of Major versions.

That’s about it.  I’ll include some screen shots when I have the time but I want to summarize the immediate benefits that this brings to them. 

1. There is only one “folder” to drop documents into which eliminates the current confusion.
2. Using metadata instead of a folder structure to categorize content gives much more flexibility to view/filter/group sets of documents that you want.  Show me all the Forms where the vendor is SAP.  Show me all the services where IBM is a member etc.
3. The content is indexed by SharePoint so searching is much quicker.
4. Security is much easier to manage through the SharePoint UI
5. Allow for the management of versions.
6. Instead of getting too worked up about categorizing every type of document create an option for Miscellaneous or Uncategorized in the Document Type column.  This will allow the customer to easily see which documents need to be categorized over time and as they work through their processes in more detail.

This is step one of what will hopefully be a concerted effort of defining the appropriate business processes, building document templates  and further understanding what types of metadata are required.  But it helps them with their immediate problem and also keeps it very simple.  Since I am not a complex thinker, keeping it simple is what I do best

Delivering Governance that Makes Sense for Your Organization

Part 1

Here is where organizational context becomes important.  We don’t currently have what I would consider to be an appropriately engaged Business Strategy team.  Despite that fact, things need to move forward.  So as a senior member of the Technical Strategy team we have decided that in order to stay proactive we’ll drive things forward and present our current and planned activities to the Business Strategy team for the thumbs up or down.  We are fortunate in that we are senior enough in the organization to have a good sense of what we need to be doing.

Part of the challenge of delivering something resembling governance model is determining what to focus on first and to create something useful that will have a positive short term impact.  If you try to deliver the comprehensive, all-bases covered governance document it will take you a year and be outdated by the time you are done.  Be agile, be smart and figure out how you can have the most impact.  Finding committed people and delegating deliverables is critical in ensuring you that you deliver anything.

In our situation the Technical Strategy team went through a collaborative process to determine what we believed to be the top  priorities.  We did this by using our own collective experience along with an analysis of all SharePoint related issues that were handled by IT and were tracked in our Help Desk software.

We then categorized these priorities based on their relative importance to one another.  We agreed on the following list:

1. Determine/Improve Current Skillset
2. Continuity and Availability
3. Policies
4. Improve Taxonomy/Information Architecture
5. Protect Data
6. Keep SharePoint technology up to date.

We then further subdivided those main focus areas into more detailed deliverables.  I won’t go into all of them but will list the ones that fall under Determine/Improve Current Skillset.  It became very clear by analyzing the data that a major impediment to the adoption of SharePoint as well as a significant source of confusion and pain for IT is related to training.

1. Site Administrator training – Tier 1
2. Help Desk training – Tier 2
3. SharePoint Administrator training – Tier 3
4. End User training

Now that the main focus areas have been determined we will present them to the Business Strategy team for approval.  In parallel, however, we will continue to move forward with the process.

The next step is falls to the tactical teams themselves.  They must review the tasks or objectives and will provide a listing of objectives they feel they own, or partly own responsibility for.  They will also prioritize the objectives they own based on what makes the most sense and provides the most business value based on the original priorities provided by this team.  Finally they will create a plan of action for how they will begin satisfying the outlined objectives.

At this point the Technical Strategy team is able to meet less frequently and with the responsibility for ensuring that the tactical teams are making appropriate progress.  They will also be responsible for clearing any roadblocks the teams might be facing.

Our realities are very similar to what most organizations are facing.  SharePoint activities and initiatives won’t and can’t stop while governance is being created and implemented.  At the same time we need to start implementing the pieces of the puzzle that will have the most impact.  What I like about this model is that it allows for that.  Responsibility is delegated to those closest to the problem.  This is a major tenet of our corporate philisophy.  It also allows for concurrent activity and implementation of completed pieces while the development of others is ongoing.

Look for Part 3 coming soon.

As stated previously I want to post about SharePoint governance and what we are learning as we go through the process.  We’ve had SharePoint (2003 and then MOSS 2007) at our organization for about 4 years now and it, along with our organization, has been consistently evolving to reach the current state.   In order to illustrate my point I want to talk about governance and also about how the potential implementation of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit will work vis-a-vis this model.

To provide some context here’s a quick overview of where things currently stand.

1. Approximately 8000 users globally and being implemented as the mandatory home page for all Active Directory members in the organization
2. Approximately 18,000 home page hits per day with 500,000+ for the entire portal per month
3. A public area and a secure area.  The public area is primarily used for communication purposes while the secure area is more collaborative.
4. 500+ sites, with a legacy mess of site collections and sites with a fairly incoherent taxonomy.
5. More SharePoint groups than I can even begin to count.
6. Divisions (manufacturing facilities) are beginning to come on board and replacing their divisional intranets with site collections on our central implementation.
7. A very poor level of overall user training.
8. Exectives are blogging reguarly
9. Integration with some LOB systems through the BDC
10. One farm, located in Toronto with:
    1. 2 load balanced front end web servers
    2. 1 application server
    3. 2 clustered SQL servers
    4. SAN
11. A very, very lean IT organization to support the platform.

I’m sure our implementation and the current state with its strengths and weaknesses is not uncommon for many organizations.  One of the areas we currently are lacking in is a governance model that works for our organization.  A lot of research has been done on the various approaches to tackling this monster and there is a lot of conflicting information.   We have decided to create 5 times, each with their own specific areas of responsibility.  Somehow I got stuck on most of these teams but that’s a story for another day.

1. Business Strategy Team
   1. This team consists of appropriate business owners willing to provide strategic insight and direction for the portal, and able to drive strategic initiatives into their respective organizations. Resources represent a good balance between business and IT, and also centralized control vs. decentralized empowerment. This team is a small, living team and can be reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.
2. Technical Strategy Team
   1. This team consists of knowledgeable technical leaders to provide technical direction on the portal. It is important that key relational systems experts should be involved in this team. If a business direction requires new integration or effort with other technologies then a technical representative for that technology will be necessary to ensure the planning, architecture, and implementation stages are more effective. This team is small and can be reconstructed on a quarterly basis with new volunteers to maintain a fresh perspective on the business and exploit the collective wisdom of the company.
3. Tactical Support Team
   1. SharePoint site owners, plant system administrators, help desk personnel, and other various support resources create an effective support system with proper channels of escalation for end users of the SharePoint environments. This team handles application questions, bugs, and other problems requiring issue resolution.
4. Tactical Operations Team
   1. Infrastructure (IT) resources provide operational support for the system as they help to ensure the enforcement of the governance plan and manage the more routine maintenance of the system by performing nightly backups, usage monitoring and analysis, scheduled task validation, and keeping the system current with security releases and system upgrades.
5. Tactical Development Team
   1. Technically talented people both willing and able to customize, personalize, and use SharePoint in a manner that fulfils the business opportunities as identified by the strategy team. This team is a loosely-knit community of developers with varying degrees of proficiency in software development. Members can range from highly skilled programmers to technically savvy end users in charge of personalizing departmental team sites. Skilled developers will handle large change requests, new features, and program management while ensuring adherence to standards.

I’ll wrap this post up and focus on organizational context and a case study of the SharePoint Podcasting Kit during the next post.

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.

I want to take a moment to post a link to a blog I can see offering a lot of excellent information.  It’s written by Kirill Karmi,  a friend and colleague who brings a tremendous amount of depth in both SharePoint and Project Management.  Don’t mind the creepy picture – he’s harmless.

http://pmp-pmprofessional.blogspot.com/

If the situation listed below sounds familiar or this image looks something like your current SharePoint implementation please read on:

http://www.intelligenceamong.us/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/sharepointstructure2.jpg

1. IT installs SharePoint
2. IT plays around with SharePoint and decides it truly is sweet and starts telling people about it. IT really though, knows nothing about the implications of what they are doing.
3. A few users start using it and things tick along “nicely” for a while.
4. They start talking about it to others and it becomes like that Susan Boyle video on YouTube.
5. Then….an executive sees it and decides that this is the answer to all our prayers your world is now significantly different.
6. Once someone realizes that things are well and truly screwed up a hasty meeting is called to talk about governance.
7. The question now is….what are we going to do about it??

Don’t despair.  It can be fixed and yes it’ll be a lot more time consuming and expensive than had you done it right in the first place – but come on.  Where is the fun in that?

The first step to doing it is getting agreement that it actually needs to be done in the first place.  After a prolonged period of staring into the cold dead eyes of people that could not be less interested the following questions may arise:

1. Who cares if IT backs up 200 gigs of data they don’t need?
2. Doesn’t it work fine now?
3. How much is this going to cost and how long is it going to take?
4. Why did you let it get this screwed up in the first place?

These are all semi-legitimate questions but there are some much more important questions to focus on:

1. What is the business risk of not having any idea who is responsible for the content on half these sites?
2. With more than 400 SharePoint security groups how can we realistically know who has access to what?  What is the potential risk?
3. What kind of information is currently being stored on our portal? Do we know?
4. How much time is spent on an ongoing basis on calls to the Help Desk to answer questions related to this debacle?
5. Is it a value-add to the organization to have 5 sites focused on the same basic operational requirements with redundant data, different users, different owners?

So we all agree that the current situation is not sustainable and we decide that we ARE going to slay this beast once and for all.  So let’s get started!  …  ….  That sound you hear is in fact the sound of crickets.

Baseline It

The first thing you need to do is understand what you currently have to work with.  This means an understanding the hierarchy of every single site collection on your portal.  I personally like the visual approach.  There are tools out there that can help but I’m a fan of Visio for this for a few reasons.  The first is that going through it manually is helpful to me to understand and remember some of the thinking that took place for why things are currently structured as they are.  The second is that the physical and mental anguish that is caused by doing it is an excellent incentive for being more proactive from now on. It’s also an excellent opportunity to weed out the sites and content that are obviously obsolete

The next step is to figure out who actually owns the sites/content.  There are tools available to do this but I always find it advantageous to use these types of opportunities to build and strengthen relationships.

Then comes security.  This is just not fun at all.  You need to truly understand what SharePoint, AD or whatever groups are being used throughout the portal, who is in them, what they have access to.  You also need to understand which ones are not being used.  A strategy around security will come later.

What do we do?

So now that you know what you’ve got what does it mean?  It actually means pretty much nothing unless you can put things into a relevant context – like the operational structure of your business.  So for example, part of your business might be an initiative to focus on global business process standards.  You currently have sites for these types of activities under finance, purchasing, IT etc. & across site collections.  This might be fine but it might make no sense in your organization.  Business processes might be related to financial reporting or how we build a new building.  Is there an executive responsible for the overall standards initiative?  Is there a common language related to these standards?  Is the content public?  These are the types of questions that need to be answered before you can really move forward.

This kind of conversation should take place on a regular basis, preferably people with some actual skin in the game.  Business needs and priorities change all the time and your SharePoint implementation must evolve in tandem – not 4 years afterward – or never.

Do 1 first

Remember that a SharePoint implementation is a journey.  But you don’t, and in fact can’t, tackle this all at once.  So focus on an area that is strategically important to your organization and do it right.  Use those lessons on the others going forward.

Contact the executive/manager responsible for the initiative and explain to them the current state of affairs and the business reasons for undertaking this project.   Before he or she gets the chance to tell you that this is the stupidest idea they have ever had the misfortune of hearing, you need to be able to cough up real data to explain the current state of affairs.  Such as:

1. You currently have 6 separate groups of people focused on standards.  They are using SharePoint and have no idea what the other is doing.
2. There is 50 megabytes of standards data that has been uploaded and it’s extremely difficult to find if you don’t know where to look.
3. 4 of the sites have different versions of the same documents on them
4. If someone moves departments you are going to have 500 documents to change the permissions on individually.  Then explain just how fun and what a value-added activity that is.

It’s important to be able to sell the value of moving forward as well.  Search is always a good one.  Telling someone that you can work with them to understand their initiative and one of the outcomes is that everyone that wants to find the information they need will be able to do it the first time, every time  (a little hyperbole never hurts).

Understand What You’ve Got

Once there is agreement on prioritization of focus you need to gather the stakeholders in the room and truly understand what you are dealing with.  What are people trying to accomplish, what are they supposed to be trying to accomplish, and what are they actually accomplishing?  This is requirements analysis 101 with the caveat that people are going to have some an emotional stake in what they have done.  The last thing they want to hear is some dude tell them that what they have been working on basically sucks.

This involves an assessment of the sites, structure and content as it currently exists.  It also involves understanding the business processes that are driving the need for the sites(s).  If your company is anything like the ones I have worked for no such documentation will exist.  It’s important as well not to lose focus on the task at hand when you are having these conversations.  If you get into wonderfully deep philosophical discussions about how great things could be and all the things that are possible you will resemble Yoda by the time this project completes.

You also need to understand the content, what purpose it serves, how much there is, where is located and why. I won’t delve too deeply in the ideas of taxonomy and information architecture here as there is tons of material on the web that can provide guidance.  Suffice it to say you want to get your new local heroes to think about and understand the language of their business so you can teach SharePoint what it is.

What is the security situation like?    How is content secured? Is it at the site level, list level or the document level?  Are groups managed in SharePoint, Active Directory, Outlook or somewhere else?

Rolling Up Our Sleeves

Well, there is no time to start like the present.  I fully realize this is a drastic oversimplification but my intention is too simple to provide a broad framework for how you might go about a task like this.

Look for more in an upcoming post…

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

I find once a few key people get the Enterprise 2.0 bug and read all the content on the web about changing demographics, retaining new and younger talent they lose clarity on where a more immediate impact can be had.  I have been guilty of this myself and want to share some thoughts on the subject.

First of all, I am a huge proponent of bringing Web 2.0 behind the firewall.  I think it has a trememdous amount of potential to democratize an organization and give people a way to have a voice and contribute to a unified effort.  Blogs, wikis, tags, folksonomies etc. are all great ideas and definitely have their place.  But attempting to implement them without first understanding the language of your organization is a mistake.

Firstly a discussion of structured vs unstructured data is in order.  I like this excerpt:

“We all know that structured data is boring and useless; while unstructured data is sexy and chock full of value. Well, only up to a point, Lord Copper. Genuinely unstructured data can be a real nuisance – imagine extracting the return address from an unstructured letter, without letterhead and any of the formatting usually applied to letters. A letter may be thought of as unstructured data, but most business letters are, in fact, highly-structured.”

I consider structured data to be information that can be easily described, has a defined container to store it and is easily searchable.  The problem is that the vast majority of business interactions take place in an unstructured environment: email, IM, RSS etc.

I saw an excellent example somewhere where someone used the example of New York City.   In a structured scenario New York could be described with a latitude and longitude, a type of City, possibly a parent State and Country attribute etc.  In an unstructured scenario New York could be referring to the city or state, the Yankees, Rangers, Jets, New York Stock Exchange etc.  Gleaning the context and intent from unstructured data is much more difficult.

I’m going to analogize in the context of MOSS 2007 but the same principles apply regardless of the technology platform.  I’ll use the example of an HR department who finds out the IT has implemented SharePoint (I’ll discuss why this is a mistake in a later post) and believes that this is the silver bullet for getting people to collaborate and share documents with each other.  The HR lead sits with IT and runs through a vague set of requirements which ends up with a few document libraries in SharePoint that grow over time to become complex enough that internal customers find it too tedious and over time revert to the previous ways of doing things.

Unfortunately the question that is usually asked is, “What content would you like to share?”.   The questions that should be asked are:

1. Who are your target audience(s)?
2. What business processes support the interactions with those audiences?
3. What is the language of HR?  In other words – what is a policy, an employment standard, leave of absence , vacation etc. 

This then leads to going through the process of identifying metadata for each type of content.  It also will allow for the idendification of standard templates and workflows.  Having this data well-thought through is the foundation of an effective enterprise search strategy.

So, instead of a customer meadering aimlessly through a semi-structured repository they are able to interact and search based on the language of the business. Without going through this process you will exacerbate the problems you currently have with your enterprise data.  In fact, if the adoption rate of the portal is near expectations it will accelerate the mayhem.  

There is a growing suite of vendors that have offerings on the market for integrating unstructured data into your business intelligence and analytics landscape.  I submit again, that if you can’t manage structured data and your business intelligence capabilities are limited you will be striking a Faustian bargain by attempting to engage a partner or implement a solution that focuses on unstructured data.

IT must have a seat at the strategic decision making table.  In order to earn that seat IT must make an ongoing business to understand your organization’s core business.  Too many IT departments never gain the required business knowledge , see themselves as nothing more than a “service” department and begin to focus on providing services that they shouldn’t.

IT needs to get out of the role of constant firefighting and become much more focused on strategic issues that will be impacting the organization going forward.  In order to do that IT needs to have rock solid infrastructure in place.  In my view, that means outsourcing any service that does not directly impact key business processes of your organization.

Email??  Why not look at hosted email services?  Do your IT people need to be experts in managing email infrastructure or do they need to be experts in helping make your business more competitive, lean and agile?  All businesses rely on email which in my view makes an even more compelling case to leaving to the experts.  Every minute one of your people spends managing email servers/issues is time they are not spending on your business.

Data Storage??  Why not look at the cloud?  This one is still a relatively new area but Amazon has recently announced their Elastic Block Store which is essentially limitless data storage which can be added to on the fly for a fraction of what it would cost to manage that infrastructure internally.  Does having people on staff that understand SAN architecture and all the associated peripheral knowledge make sense?  Possibly, but we need to be thinking outside the box.  Your competitors are.  Actually this is not even outside the box anymore.  This just makes sense.

Portals? SharePoint?  Why in the world an organization would want to manage all the infrastructure and complexity of an installation of something like a SharePoint farm is beyone me – unless you are a SharePoint hosting company I suppose.  I speak from painful personal experience here.  There are options out there.

I think of it this way.  If I was launching a greendfield manufacturing facility my IT team would have to make a damn compelling case for each server they want to have on site.   Being at the fore of the coming IT revolution means being able to focus on your business and leaving all the other stuff to the experts.  Be an expert on your business.