SharePoint Tip of the Month
March 2011: The Silver Bullet for SharePoint Adoption
I’m meeting my client for dinner after a full day of SharePoint meetings. I’m meeting the VP of IT and a few members of his team, all of whom agree that SharePoint is being used in amazing ways… by exactly 1% of the company. In fact, that 1% is represented by the people seated around the table. After drink orders are placed, the VP asks, “Now that you know our story and how IT is using SharePoint, what’s the game plan for rolling out SharePoint to the rest of the organization?”
This is a very common question with an infinite number of variables. As I begin thinking of the hundreds of ways we can positively affect corporate adoption of SharePoint, I decide instead to reduce my ideas to their essence. I say, “SharePoint is a Verb. It’s all about active pursuit, not passive receipt.”
“That sounds awfully Zen,” mocks the DBA. I begin to explain myself as the laughter subsides.
While SharePoint increases an individual’s access to information, removes barriers where information silos exist, flattens organizational hierarchies and transforms how people collectively build content, it’s often the case that SharePoint is only perceived as a technology product and not the mind-shifting platform that can alter an organization’s culture.
To realize the largest benefit SharePoint provides, one must ‘lean forward’ toward its capabilities, not ‘lean back.’ Leaning forward means that you promote, communicate, train, market and socialize its features to your organization in language they understand: the language of tangible productivity enhancements and recognizing documents as ‘organizational assets’ rather than simply as content to be stored.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, often asks startup companies, “What are you doing to harness the intelligence of your users?” I’m certain, more often than not, that he receives responses riddled with clichés rather than the more concrete steps organizations are taking to ensure that knowledge is captured and shared in a manner that benefits the organization and the individual worker. The first step in this harnessing of intelligence begins, of course, with socializing your user community on exactly how SharePoint can facilitate the sharing of knowledge.
Here are a few ideas regarding how you can make SharePoint an active part of your information workers day so that the technology of SharePoint fades into the background while the use of SharePoint comes to the front
1. Encourage Active Participation through Knowledge Centers
A lot of organizations are worried about the baby boomer brain drain, where companies will soon begin to lose their most experienced, knowledgeable workers. To ensure that the institutional knowledge they have doesn’t leave with them, many organizations are actively building SharePoint-based knowledge centers to capture and socialize the lessons learned by organizational veterans. One client’s HR department shared with me that 30% of their employees were over the age of 56. Not a bad thing in and of itself, but this was keeping management awake at night as they reflected on all that hard-won knowledge that would soon be leaving their company due to retirement. This prompted them to begin initiatives to capture knowledge through documents, wikis, videos and podcasts and store them on a SharePoint site. Once the information was in SharePoint, individuals began to sort and categorize the content.
SharePoint Wikis work particularly well to facilitate knowledge centers within an organization. Those of you aware of SharePoint Wikis may think that wiki pages simply aren’t powerful enough to work as a knowledge capture method. In fact, the power of SharePoint Wikis is their simplicity. Highly flexible and configurable, wiki pages allow both technical and non-technical people to quickly contribute their knowledge in a manner that’s instantly shared amongst a group. Combine this with SharePoint’s site usage reporting and you can begin to determine the individuals that are spending significant time contributing their knowledge to the site so that you can reward them.
This type of knowledge capture initiative doesn’t just happen; you must build an easy to use SharePoint site, provide abundant instruction on the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ and socialize a reward system that celebrates those that contribute. A mixture of organized knowledge-gathering initiatives, personal interviews or a month long focus on gathering as much information as possible communicates to your company that this is a top priority for your organization. This is an ACTIVE pursuit of content and knowledge.
2. Actively Socialize What SharePoint HAS Done for Your Business
SharePoint is not a ‘set it and forget it’ technology. You can’t install SharePoint, train people how to use the software and expect the successful adoption of the platform to take root. To be successful, you must have an evangelist that speaks the language of the business user. The perfect person to perform this role is someone that is outside of the IT department that is defining ways for their department to employ SharePoint to manage business information and resolve business problems.
Look for successes within your company and use them to socialize the power of SharePoint to everyone. When you find these successes, write them up in a ‘press release’ format and send them out in your corporate newsletter or, better yet, post them to your SharePoint site. When writing your success stories, remember to ‘Shoot for PAR,’ shorthand for Problem, Action and Resolution.
Focus first on describing the business problem that affected the department and how they arrived at the conclusion that SharePoint could address and resolve their problem. Provide some specific details, such as the amount of time it takes for a business process to occur or the wasted time associated with creating several reports from multiple systems. Next, capture the actions the department took to define the problem’s core issues and outline the steps taken to configure SharePoint as a solution. Again, provide some details with regards to how SharePoint was leveraged. This is what people really want to read about and are seeking to internalize.
Lastly, share the resolution, or outcome, that the team experienced after the newly created SharePoint solution was put in place and users were educated regarding how to use it. These success stories don’t need to be high-end SharePoint solutions that require a PhD to configure. In fact, they are more actionable if they are simple, easy to understand and steps are shared about how almost anyone can build a similar solution. Creating these success stories takes time and focused effort to interview, write and socialize but they can make a huge difference in the ability for people to understand how to apply the capabilities of SharePoint to their own work. When done correctly, this pays large dividends.
3. It’s All About People
I really like Michael Sampson’s concept of collaboration in his outstanding book, SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration: Using SharePoint to Enhance Business Collaboration. Sampson writes, “To be collaborative means that you embrace a certain way of life and work… an openness to the ideas of other people, and in particular to how their ideas and perspectives may mold, change and transform your ideas… To be collaborative then, is in essence a human process, that plays out over whatever modality of interaction you use with other people, be that face-to-face, e-mail, a wiki or any other ‘collaborative technology’.”
If individuals can’t internalize how SharePoint will benefit them directly, your SharePoint solution may never reach its full potential. Prior to understanding SharePoint, however, they must understand what it means to collaborate with one another. This may seem a simple comment, but it’s fraught with the pitfalls associated with an individual’s life experience, their desire to share (or not to share) and their ideas about the benefit of sharing the information that it likely took them years to gather.
Therefore, it’s important to keep the concepts of collaboration ‘top of mind’. You do this by persistently requesting that knowledgeable SharePoint staff attend business team meetings to discuss the power of SharePoint. You might also choose to create short videos that outline what people are doing with SharePoint or you can produce a SharePoint site where people see HOW to build a functional SharePoint task list or a meaningful document library. These activities help people take the initiative to build their own SharePoint solutions because it’s easier to copy an existing example that works well than it is to come up with a solution from scratch. Frequent interaction with the user community is an investment you must make in order to realize the highest possible return on your SharePoint investment.
These three ideas only scratch the surface of how you can make SharePoint a Verb within your organization. Encouraging others to share their knowledge, promoting how SharePoint has saved a team time or effort and focusing not on the technology of SharePoint but rather on the people using the technology will start you on your path to a highly collaborative and active information sharing environment.
This month’s SharePoint Tip contributed by Lee Reed, Abel Solutions’ Director of SharePoint Strategy.
