How to drive value from Sharepoint and the Microsoft platform
- Why is it that informationworkers
spend their whole day working with software they find less attractive than the
software they use for personal matters, such as Facebook?
- How many of your business
solutions achieved Web 2.0'esque viral adoption in the target organization? How
may employees got really excited about the opportunity in the new IT solution?
For the past 5 years all I've
really been doing is to try to piece the Microsoft platform puzzle together for
a wide range of customers. I've tried to the best of my ability to use the
enormous potential of the Microsoft platform to deliver exciting solutions, but
I still have the feeling of not reaching the target quite yet.
My newest venture with
Puzzlepart is all about helping businesses
capitalizing on the resource of the platform, and I want to elaborate a bit
more on my thoughts and backgrounders on this subject.
In my consulting experience
I've seen a lot of recurring gaps in the platform. Some are weaknesses; some
are just open spaces ready to be filled with business functionality. This is
the way the Microsoft platform is intended to be, and leaves the rest up to
ISVs and consultancies to figure out. When they don't, end-users get really
discouraged.
(Update: Craig Roths Sharepoint: It's Not a Gap, It's Room for an Ecosystem)
Fortunately there are a lot of really creative people and
companies out there who are continuously working to make business software
better, in order to allow businesses to operate more efficiently. And that's what it's all about:
Making businesses more effective with the use of IT.
I think much of the answer is
in getting to the right business questions. Let me exemplify:
One of the reflections I did
after having participated in several Sharepoint 2003 and MOSS 2007 projects,
was that user adoption tended to be a tough nut to crack. Another was that very
few customers were concerned with measuring the effectiveness of the solution
empirically after the implementation. "Just get that new IT solution in place
and somebody probably will use it".
Back in 2006 I wrote an
initial spec for a Sharepoint based solution I called "Intranet Adoption
Dashboard", and we did a POC for it. The idea was to load usage statistics from
Sharepoint into a small SQL Server Analysis Services data mart and correlate
that information in the cube against organizational information from Active
Directory or an HR system. Unfortunately (in my opinion) customers didn't want
to pay for it, and no 3rd party vendor were offering such a solution at the
time.
Having an Adoption dashboard
would significantly improve and organizations ability to follow up on the usage
patterns of the intranet, and not only from an intranet-page-and-area
perspective, but also a organizational perspective, and in that way, ask more
important business questions:
"Why is the sales department
really active, while HR never visits the intranet at all?"
or
"Check out Chuck; he's the most successful
Sales Rep. and he's also the most active user of our portal. Wow! Could the
other sales reps do better if they were encouraged to get with the program?"
Fortunately, since then,
Nintex have
built a very similar solution to the Adoption Dashboard called Nintex Reporting which gives you a lot of this
type of value.
Consultancies who are
delivering Sharepoint solutions should embrace these kinds of products and
package them with services telling the customer:
"We bet that we'll be able to
increase your intranet usage with 50% in 1 year if you follow our advice with
Sharepoint and these great 3rd party tools. All you have to do is let us help
you with the agile evolution of your intranet for this one year!"
So now we got the customers
asking the right questions, and we got the consultants helping them with
answers (process and technical). Then what's the problem? In my opinion
it is close to impossible to deliver a reasonably complex Sharepoint solution
of high quality that excites users without great 3rd party products. With too much custom development the TCO just won't add up. In spite of that, a lot of
customers reject the notion of anything but Microsoft branded software.
This week I attended the
Norwegian Sharepoint Community meeting in Oslo. The topic was metadata
management with Sharepoint. 3rd party add-ons were demonstrated and discussed
among the Sharepoint professionals. Several had the experience of customers
declining to buy 3rd party software on the grounds of price or "the vendor is
too small" (aka risky). Peter Crook from Steria was wondering why customers won't
pay $20k for a product from a small vendor, but they will gladly pay a single
local consultant the same amount to create a custom solution.
Which will be better
documented? Which will be better supported in 2 years? Quite clearly the 3rd
party product. The decision of buying "only Microsoft (and
quite a few consulting hours)" will never cost you your job. Making a bad 3rd
party vendor selection might.
In saying this, and coming
from a consultancy background, I want to join Mike Fitzmaurice in saying: "Do
the math: Third party Add-Ons are your friend"
So what has all of this to do
with me leaving consultancy to establish Puzzlepart?
Obviously, as I'm about to
participate in creating products, these opinions are timely in that
manner:) But; I've made this choice
because I'm dead serious about starting to ask the right business questions,
and answering them in a way that delivers measurable results. To accomplish
that goal I needed to "go products". A business system geared for products is required to deliver the quality needed in this arena. The business model and production systems of consultancies will either be too expensive or won't reach the quality standards.
We need more people working on
truly great business solutions that excite users on the robust platforms
delivered by the big vendors. We need consultancies to help implement these
solutions, through configuration of platform, and assembly of 3rd party
products with very high quality. And we need strong 3rd party product vendors
to deliver that high quality innovation that make business solutions excite
users and spread virally within businesses like Facebook and the likes have
done amongst you and your friends.
That's the challenge. And
hopefully Puzzlepart will contribute piece by piece and part by part to
get there in the coming years.