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.

We are currently looking at ways of optimizing the performance of our SharePoint implemention and I learned something very simple about Web Parts that I did not know.   We have had users that when removing Web Parts from our pages are placing the page in Edit mode and “removing” the unwanted web parts by the method shown below:

This has been going on for some time.  Navigating to the Web Parts maintenance page (easily accessible by appending “?contents=1″ at the end of URL of the page in question) shows the following!

The Web Parts are still considered as being on the page but you simply can’t view them.  These means that additional resources are being used render and download the page.  In fact this same situation will occur if you use the Close option as shown in the screen shot below.

The proper way to remove Web Parts from the page is to use the Delete option.  Simple. 

A more eloquently written post I stumbled across can be found here: http://gvaro.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!B06529FD3FC75473!379.entry

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.

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:

1. 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.
2. What are the business processes, across functional areas, that will support this initiative?
3. 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.

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 think it’s about time I took a minute to give props to the people that have created and continue to evolve the WordPress platform.  For those of you that aren’t aware, WordPress is an open-source blogging application that makes it dead simple for anyone to contribute to the read/write web.

It allows the easy development and changing of themes so you can give your web site a completely different look in a matter of moments.  It’s adminstration tools are straightforward and allow the writing and mangement of posts, tags, categories, comments, media etc.   You can also easily customize the design of your pages using widgets (tag cloud, rss feeds, archives, recent posts etc).  Some themes support multiple side bars (sections you can add widgets to) and some contain none.  It’s usually specified with the theme when you download it.

It not only supports consuming RSS feeds but with any good Web 2.0 platform it also creates an RSS feed that anyone interesting in your rantings can consume and syndicate with an RSS reader.

There are also a lot of different web hosts available – I use DreamHost and man do they have a slick interface their users.  I can’t believe how far they have come since I last had a web site in 2002. 

Granted I work in IT and have a technical background but here’s the summary.  I thought about this site on a Monday.  Registered my domain name the next day, created an account with DreamHost that day and installed and had my first post up on the web in the afternoon.  I read almost none of the documentation on WordPress – it’s that straightforward.

If you want to know more about this tool I’d be happy to share what I’ve learned.

I’m sure most of you have seen this video on youtube or some derivative of it.  The ironic thing about the video is that it’s premise ensures that it will be outdated almost immediately.  Thankfully there have been a few updates to it.  Please check a version from last year called Did You Know 3.  I’ve showed these videos to an awful lot of people and all are flabbergasted and most are clueless about what to do about it.

I see such a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on this that I get goosebumps everytime I watch it.  It’s not hard to envision a world where I have one identity that allows my Facebook, Live, YouTube, Twitter, Flicker etc. etc. etc connections and content be assembled into a coherent universal profile that can be marketed to.  Just think about searching for a car and being able to see which of my friends own that car and their thoughts on it!