SharePoint Tip of the Month

June 2009: Leveraging Your SharePoint Investment for Business Productivity

SharePoint’s ubiquity has been well documented. Microsoft’s fastest growing product ever, SharePoint took the market by storm and has been deployed to 100’s of millions of users. The reason for this dramatic adoption is not so profound. The product has clear and present value right out of the box and can be put to productive use as a collaboration platform with relative ease.

The blessing that is the cause of SharePoint’s success can also be considered its curse. Once deployed and adopted within an organization, SharePoint collaboration sites can spread like kudzu (a botanical reference we Georgian’s nod knowingly at, but might require our Yankee and west-of-Mississippi readers to “bing” – yes, bing.com; give it a try.) A kudzu-infested SharePoint deployment will continue to provide value to the organization, no doubt. But there is so much more to SharePoint than disconnected collaboration sites. How can your organization leverage its investment and uncover discrete value opportunities in the form of business productivity solutions?

We are by now all familiar with the SharePoint “wheel” of feature functionality. It’s that Microsoft Powerpoint slide that has found its way (well yes, like kudzu) into every SharePoint presentation. There’s a lot under the hood and oftentimes it’s hard for an organization to get their arms around what SharePoint can do for them. (Honestly it’s hard for the SharePoint consultants sometimes to get their arms around what SharePoint can do for their customers!) At Abel Solutions we like to simplify things. The essence of SharePoint is the Four Promises it can fulfill:

• Collaboration
• Information Management
• Business Process Automation
• Business Performance Management

In order to realize the full value of SharePoint, the IT organization must look at opportunities for systems improvement across the organization within the framework of these Four Promises.

Let’s take an example to make this idea more concrete. Let’s say the Legal Department has a need to greatly enhance their processes associated with contract and other legal document management. Let’s further assume that the company has adopted SharePoint and has a base deployment in place. As such it makes sense that SharePoint will be considered as the platform for addressing the discrete need for systems improvement expressed by the Legal Department.

In this scenario, the business analyst begins by assessing the current state in the context of the Four Promises described above: How are those involved in the business function collaborating to get the job done? What types of information are being managed? What are the processes involved? How do managers assess status so they can take action as appropriate?

Only by asking questions that cover all four of these areas will the analyst begin to uncover the full range of needs and define a solution that more fully leverages the organization’s SharePoint investment.

To complete the example started above, the analyst follows the current state assessment with the documentation of the business requirements, again in the context of SharePoint’s Four Promises. A solutions architect then documents a SharePoint solution approach and an implementation estimate. The solution approach and estimate are then presented back to the customer (Legal Department in this case) so that a decision can be made with respect to project funding.

At Abel Solutions we call these discrete evaluations “Business Productivity Assessments” or BPA’s. With a very modest investment of time, an IT organization or consultant on behalf of the IT organization can provide BPA’s to various departments or business units to assess their discrete needs and determine how they can more fully leverage the SharePoint investment of their organization.

For more information on Abel Solutions’ BPA process, please contact us.