A Matter Of Degree

Going public about my momentous and exciting role change

Image courtesy of the Ad Generator, which mashes up fragments of real corporate slogans with Flickr images to generate ersatz advertisements on the fly.

OK, perhaps it's not momentous and/or exciting to anyone but me. But today I want to go public with the news that I have taken on the role of Director of Marketing at BlueMetal Architects.

I have already been working in this capacity for several months, and I am absolutely thrilled by this change, which translates my experience helping clients be successful on a project-by-project basis to a comprehensive strategy for driving success and satisfaction across all our clients.  I'm working with a much broader spectrum of technologies, where I continue to emphasize strategy and maturity in our solutions, and I'm interacting more closely with the great teams of experts in all our practices and locations.  Among many other initiatives, I now have responsibility for focusing on the people at BlueMetal and helping each one of them build their individual brands.  And best of all, I get to do all this in an environment that encourages innovation and creativity, where I can continually challenge myself and others to lead with the strength of our differences (rather than trying to mimic our competition).  And our differences are VERY strong.

In the past few months, the folks who've learned my news all had similar questions for me.  Because I can't resist an opportunity to re-use information, I put together this FAQ.

 

Why Marketing?

Information Technology welcomed me in when I was young, as it did for so many of us, and I made my career there doing what I'd always been good at - organizing information, simplifying processes, connecting people, surfacing knowledge.  But after many years of doing IT work that other people encouraged me to do, I could no longer ignore the signs:  in my free time I read Marketing books.  Walking into stores with my kids, I talked to them about brand recognition and consumer behavior.  I admired logos, labels and packaging for their own sake.  I subscribed to technology blogs but I read marketing and design blogs.  I envied the Marketing staff at the companies where I worked.  I harrassed the company leaders to update the corporate website, start listening via social media, and value thought leadership over brochureware.   I worked nights and weekends to build my personal brand in the technology community, and that felt like the most fun part of my work week.

Then, this past Fall, we started interviewing candidates for a Marketing position at BlueMetal.  Though the candidates were excellent, I found myself thinking, "They're not saying exactly what I want to hear.  I know our company and this business.  I can do better."  I pitched my plan - and got the job.

It felt like a huge risk at the time - like stepping away from ten years' investment building my resume in a certain direction - but today it feels like one of the best decisions I ever made.

 

What's going to happen to the SharePoint Maturity Model?

It's alive and well, and with the help of the community I will continue to maintain and improve it, update it for new versions of the product, collect data, and share that data periodically.

 

Why would you leave the beautiful SharePoint platform and its magnificent community of users and practitioners?

While I'll be doing less hands-on delivery of SharePoint projects, I definitely won't be stepping away from SharePoint or the community.  If anything I'll have the latitude to be even more involved in community groups and events, and to continue to offer tools to the community such as the SharePoint Maturity Model.

 

Is this like the time when that other SharePoint evangelist made a big deal of announcing his retirement from the community, but then never seemed to go away?

No.

 

Thanks for reading - now go dream at the speed of everything!  (I swear by it!)

Follow-up to the Inaugural Boston Women in SharePoint Chapter Meeting

Many thanks to all those who came out last night for the first Boston Women in SharePoint Chapter meeting, and to Leanne Bateman for organizing!  We had a great discussion at MeadHall in Cambridge about the reality of being a woman in tech and in SharePoint specifically.  As a follow-up I wanted to share some resources that I keep in mind when facing challenging situations at work.

Read McKinsey's research on the potential of women in the U.S. economy.  "In its 2011 research, Catalyst found a 26% difference in return on invested capital (ROIC) between the top-quartile companies (with 19-44% women board representation) and bottom quartile companies (with zero woman directors)."

Watch Helen Greiner's speech when she accepted the Women in Vision award in 2008.  She shares challenges ("Growing up, not one person told me that I should be an engineer"), presents a compelling case for diversity of perspective in technology, and provides suggestions for things to say to ANY young person (starting at 6:18).

Contemplate yesterday's spot on NPR "Boys Are At The Back Of The Class," as well as Newsweek's article on the "Mancession." 

For inspiration, read Seth Godin.  He has a way of making positive outcomes seem possible.

Addition 2/14/13 - read HBR's research report "The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology." (Thanks to Pam Parker for the link to this great report!)

Hope to see you at the next chapter meeting in 4 months!  Join the Boston Women in SP LinkedIn group to receive updates on the group's activity.

 

Recent Notes on Women in SharePoint / Women in Tech / Women in Leadership

 

A few interesting things have come out on the women in SharePoint / women in tech / women in leadership subject in the past month, and I wanted to share them here:

Last Friday, the Harvard Business Review blog ran the post "How female leaders should handle double standards."  "When people are focused on how they are coming across to others — managing their image — they divert their attention away from their larger leadership purpose, are less clear about their goals and less open to learning."

Pam Parker (Women in SharePoint Boston member) wrote a blog on "Real lessons we should be learning from the guys."  "Women hold only 25% of the jobs in IT and that rate has been falling since the 1980s.  But because of the diverse skillsets needed for SharePoint and the importance of providing collaboration driven solutions, there are a variety of career opportunities for women and we have a wonderful opportunity to develop an increasingly strong female contingency."

The Boston Globe observed "Women Remain Outsiders in Video Game Industry" - "The small pool of women candidates has been a problem for other technology sectors, which in turn has spurred efforts by industry, higher education, and even the Girl Scouts to encourage girls and women to enter so-called STEM fields: science, technology, engineering, and math. Some chief executives at video game companies acknowledge they need more women in the industry, since nearly half the customers are female, and women over 18 are the fastest growing demographic."

"Objectify a Male Tech Writer Day" was launched and then canceled by Leigh Alexander.  The goal of the day had been to "highlight by example what a gendered compliment looks like, and to get people talking in a funny and lighthearted way about how these kinds of comments distract from meaningful dialogues and make writers online feel like their point of view is only as relevant as how attractive they are."

Finally - a Boston chapter of Women In SharePoint recently formed; the first meeting will be held tomorrow, Tuesday 2/12/13, at MeadHall in Cambridge at 6 pm.  I'll be warming up the meeting with some thoughts on being a woman in the SharePoint community.  Last Spring I participated in Softartisans' "Stories from the WIT Trenches" (a GREAT series to read), and since then I have been paying close attention to the local WIT climate.  Let me just say, this will be a reality-based get-together, which will NOT include Jazzercise during the breaks.  To the women in the regional SharePoint community, I hope to see you there!

Key Takeaways - SharePoint Conference 2012 - Day 1 - #SPC12

SPC12 kicked off yesterday with keynotes from Jared Spataro and others.  Following are the points I considered most relevant from the keynotes.

Metrics of the conference:
10,000 attendees
85 countries
200 vendors

Spataro led with a nod to the SharePoint Community, mentioning the MVPs, SP Saturdays, and user groups.  This was warmly welcomed by the audience (I was watching the Twitter stream as well as listening to audience reaction), but it seemed like a calculated move to show how Microsoft "gets" community.

Spataro discussed three key themes for SharePoint going forward:
 • Experiences - enhancements designed to make SP easy to access and "a joy to use"
 • Innovation
 • Ecosystem - new app model & store

He also emphasized the move toward greater simplicity  in SharePoint. 

Documents:
 - Surface documents regardless of where they are in the hierarchy or in folders
 - See the security on a document inline
 - Create a new file in the site without having the Office client
 - Drag and drop into a library without needing ActiveX controls.
 - Share content by inviting inline with autocomplete of names, and choice to require sign-in or not
 - SkyDrive Pro for local access to content
 
Sites:
 - See list of sites I'm following
 - See list of suggested sites to follow (from the FAST recommendation technology)
 - Immersive mode for fullscreen mobile device viewing ("content only")
 - Skin sites with drag-and-drop, no CSS editing - Spataro demo-ed the ability to add a picture as a watermarked background in about 2 seconds.
 - Visualize tasks on sites with the project and task management bar - and an answer for aggregating tasks for all sites - "My Tasks" - all in one place which synchronizes with tasks in Outlook.
 - Mobile app for the social features - see the content I'm following - downloadable TODAY for Win 7, iPhone & iPad available "early next year."
 
Yammer:
 - The message here was that there were three main reasons (and a hidden fourth) why MS acquired Yammer:
  ○ Best-in-class social
  ○ Rapid innovation - a "way of life at Yammer" - (will it still be the case now that MS owns them?)
  ○ Voluntary adoption - helps users "get comfortable with the cloud"
  ○ "fun bunch of folks" - "a few drinks drinked in between coding" - and they use whiteboards at Yammer!
 - Adam Pisoni demo-ed the "activity story" - new "post to Yammer" button in the ribbon.  Documents shared from SharePoint are visible in Yammer as full-fidelity preview.
 - Pisoni also demo-ed a "sneak peek" Yammer on Windows 8 in the Modern UI. 
 - Roadmap:  SPOnline will include Yammer for free.

Richard Riley then gave the highlights for Search, Web Publishing, and ECM.

Search:
 - Single search engine unifying FAST & SP - now with "intuitive, actionable, and personal" interface.  "Personal re-find links" direct you back to the results page you've searched before.
 - Visual aspects - refiners (by date), thumbnail preview to "hovercard" with details about the file.
 - "Results block" - a bracketed area that groups content translated by query rules behind the scene.  Brings back results e.g. PowerPoint files when search term is "deck."
 
Web Publishing:
 - Use ANY web publisher to edit pages for SP - no longer constrained to using SP Designer. (Live demo got an error from Dreamweaver - to which Riley responded "it always works the second time."

 

Other notes from today:

On the vendor floor, lots of great examples of community-created content becoming part of the vendor message:

- Metalogix and Axceler encouraging attendees to take pictures with their mascots and tweet them

- Several exhibitors offering hands-on situations where attendees could create their own experience.

 

Key Takeaways - SharePoint Conference 2012 - Day 0 - #SPC12

The 2012 Microsoft SharePoint Conference kicked off yesterday at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.  The theme this year is "Share More, Do More;" in this blog over the nexts few days I'll share a few highlights from each day.

My taxi ride from the airport was a microcosm of the high-caliber attendees of this conference - I shared a van with a SharePoint Product Manager from Microsoft as well as folks from Deloitte, Avanade, and Axceler.  Naturally, the ride ended up being sponsored by Axceler (thanks Christian!).  I then went to the opening reception from 6-9 pm, and afterwards to a small "ShareSalon" organized by Ruven Gotz and Erica Toelle.  Here are my takeaways from today:

1. A Help / Training tool for SharePoint:  At the ShareSalon, Sue Hanley and others were strongly recommending Asif Rehmani's VisualSP, a ribbon-based, context-senstitive, on-demand Help feature, that can promote adoption and user satisfaction.  These experts have seen how effective it can be with their clients and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

2. A new SharePoint consultancy focused solely on the content experience side of SharePoint:  Michal Pisarek and a few others have founded Dynamic Owl, a consulting firm focusing on strategy, business analysis, information architecture, and governance for SharePoint.  The fact that a firm of this nature can exist (and thrive) now is one more indicator of the shift toward a more business-aligned, user-oriented approach to this platform (the approach I call Content Experience).

3. The economic flip side of the conference:  I just wanted to note that, as the folks from the SharePoint community were socializing at the expo reception last night, many talking about how much business they have (or are trying to get), I spoke to quite a few people from the convention center who were working the reception as waitstaff, bartenders, security, etc. - and the overwhelming theme was the lack of work in Vegas.  I don't mean that anyone was complaining - the tone was very much a positive, consistent one of "thank you for being here, thank you for bringing this business."  When I joked with one of the bartenders, "I know you say that to all the vendors," he said "No, really, you have gotten us out of the house for four days this week.  Thank you."  Comments like that and many others I heard, with their underlying message of how much people are NOT able to find work in this city, really point up how lucky the SharePoint folks are to be on the "good" side of a very in-demand technology.

Who Loves Them Some SharePoint Maturity? Recent Data from the SharePoint Maturity Model Shows Who

With the number of SharePoint Maturity assessments having just reached 300 (by which I mean 300 valid, vetted records from in-person assessments and data from the free online app), I wanted to celebrate by sharing some data about who's taking the assessments.

First, let's look at responses by number of years of use, from one year and under up to ten years:

You can see that responses really start to drop off for 7 years of use and greater.  While it's understandable that the product is seeing greater adoption with each version, hence a larger sample size from the more recent years, I would love to have more responses from 7-10 year SharePoint implementations.  If you or someone you know falls in this category, please consider taking the no-strings-attached online assessment or contacting me to go through it in person; it will make the data better for everyone!

Next, let's look at responses by industry type:

Way to go Finance and Insurance!  I salute you for your efforts to understand your progress with SharePoint, and I hope the assessment is helping all of you in every industry to build your roadmaps!

Now we can slice by the number of IT Support Staff supporting the SharePoint implementation:

And by organization size expressed in number of employees:

And finally by annual budget range:

SharePoint community - what do you think about these numbers?  Any surprises?  Any additional data you'd like to see?  Drop me a comment or catch up with me in person - over the next couple of months I'll be taking the SharePoint Maturity Model to:

October 18 - Washington DC - SharePoint Leadership Forum hosted by Bamboo Solutions

October 18 - Washington DC - SharePoint Symposium

October 25 - Boston - SharePoint SpeakOut - with Axceler, Microsoft, Harmon.ie, and HiSoftware

November 11-14 - Las Vegas - MS SharePoint Conference - I'm not presenting a session but will be attending sessions and hanging with my team at booth #666.  Please drop by!

Annual Budget for SharePoint Most Affects Readiness Competencies

In February of this year I began to collect data on "annual budget range for SharePoint and SP Projects" as part of SharePoint Maturity assessments.  There are now more than 200 assessments which include this data, and I wanted to share the results so far.

It appears that the competencies most obviously affected by budget are the Readiness competencies - Infrastructure and Administration, Staffing and Training, and Customizations (i.e. how customizations to SharePoint are supported). 

Here are the numbers (click to enlarge):

Here are just the solution competencies:

And here are the Readiness competencies:

The good news is that more budget gets you a more trustworthy infrastructure and more hands to help.  The bad news is that this rising tide isn't lifting all boats.  Line items for servers and staff have been around long before SharePoint was a twinkle in Microsoft's eye, so it makes sense that companies would feel comfortable dedicating funds to them.  If you want to use your SharePoint platform to automate your business processes or provide an integrated reporting dashboard, you'll need money as well as servers and staff; yet this data indicates that even the highest budgets aren't pushing these projects along.  Why?

Looking for answers and resources to share, I searched for information on budgets for SharePoint and justification for SharePoint.  I found:

• Technical consultants who want to help organizations define their budget for SharePoint
• Detailed information on startup costs (initial servers and licensing)
• A wide range of project management tools

But I didn't find a lot of helpful information on justifying and budgeting the more complex projects that we hear about so often from vendors, at conferences, in thought leadership from the tech community, and of course from Microsoft.  There were a few gems, however, included in the Resources section below.

I'll be at SPTechCon Boston this week to talk more about SharePoint Maturity.  If you're planning to be there, I'd love to hear from you why you think the numbers above are the way they are.  If not, please comment and let me know what you think, or if you know of a great resource I've missed.

Resources:

A Practical Framework for SharePoint Metrics - by Susan Hanley - a comprehensive whitepaper detailing how to link business objectives to metrics and how to gather them.

Learn to talk to your CFO in their language - by Paul Culmsee - a must-read series and the most comprehensive thinking/strategy I have seen on this topic

How Do You Measure SharePoint – Metrics for Business Users by Veronique Palmer (with reference to Jamison, Cardarelli, and Hanley)

Doing a SharePoint Assessment - by Mauro Cardarelli

Interesting "buy one get one free" approach from the SharePoint Visioneer

Toward A Better Content Experience with Office 15 and SharePoint 2013 - Part 1

Office 15 and SharePoint 2013 are out - but will they address what the business users really want?

With yesterday's consumer-oriented release of the Office 15 and SharePoint 2013 previews, I wanted to share my findings on what users in the enterprise will expect from these products.  Supporting Mahan Khalsa's assertion that "solutions have no inherent value," I'll focus on the worth that people will place on Office 15 and SharePoint 15 based on how well these products address their needs.

NOT THIS...

Most existing references to content experience describe how to improve an anonymous interaction with a public website.  I'm talking about the much more complex interactions around enterprise content within an organization.

You can find plenty of diagrams of content lifecycles, but most of them focus on a piece of content moving through the system, much like good old Bill passing through the House and Senate on Capitol Hill. What I'll discuss here is a more nonlinear approach to content experience, with a user perspective rather than an object perspective.

I'm also not addressing "social" as an entity, or "collaboration."  I don't place these concepts on their own, in a vacuum, but include them as they form part of the overall content experience.

 ...BUT THIS:

I'm focusing on content - the work product we produce.  It might be documents, reports, data, comments, annotations, reviews, notes, sketches, diagrams, photos, graphics, audio, video - in short, the artifacts of our work that are being produced at a greater rate today than at any time previously.

 WHAT DO USERS WANT?

After ten years working with SharePoint, six of them consulting, I've found that what people want from ANY content management system looks like this:

Figure 1 - Content Experience Lifecycle

...which can be expanded to include any number of sub-activities:

Figure 2 - Content Experience Lifecycle with Sub-Activities

...and which supports and relates to the higher-level strategic goals of the user and the organization:

Figure 3 - Content Experience Related To Tactical Activities and Strategic Goals

In the coming weeks I'll present a series of articles on how well Office 15 and SharePoint 2013 meet the needs outlined in Figure 1, above.  I'm looking forward to seeing how these products address the requests that I hear from my clients every day, and to identifying the gaps for which we'll need to find proactive solutions.

 

 

Live from SharePoint Saturday Boston - User-Focused Sessions

I'm at SharePoint Saturday Boston today and am noticing a particular trend - in the sessions I'm attending, from Beginner-level content management or Advanced-level automated site provisioning (and everything in between), the speaker's message to the audience includes this:

CONSIDER THE USERS.

This is not to say that the excellent presenters at SharePoint Saturday Boston have not delivered this message in the past; it's more to say that at this, the biggest SharePoint Saturday Boston has yet seen, the theme seems pervasive through the wide variety of subject matter. 

I'm so happy to see this focus throughout the talks (not only in Governance and Adoption sessions). My guess is that innovations in user experience on the Web and in consumer technology products have made a focus on UX, even in SharePoint, impossible to ignore.

The audience is as interactive and collaborative as ever, and not only have I learned some new tricks today, I've been able to make new connections with smart and passionate people in this community. 

Thank you to all those who attended my session on "Tracking and Reporting on a NonLinear Process with InfoPath and PowerPivot" (slides available here), and thank you to the organizers and sponsors who made the day possible.  Looking forward to next year!

Making the Functional Beautiful

 I'm having one of those idealistic moments. I just learned about the decorative manhole covers used in Japan...

Kawaguchiko Yamanashi manhole cover（山梨県河口湖町のマンホール） from MRSY on Flickr

...and it's reminding me that even the most humble, functional parts of our daily life can be beautiful, funny, appealing, inspirational. 

iga city manhole cover 006 by Ma_Yu_Na on Flickr

It's easy to put up barriers and blocks to this kind of design.

    "We don't have the budget."

    "Nobody can agree on what it should be."

    "We ran out of budget."

These manhole covers are an example of what can happen when you don't allow the barriers to deter you.

Akashina Nagano manhole cover（長野県明科町のマンホール）by MRSY on Flickr

I'm asking myself, "What can I do, today, to elevate something that's considered purely functional to a higher level?"

For inspiration:

Japanese Manhole Covers group on Flickr

Japanese Manhole Covers - list of resources - links to photo galleries, interactive maps, etc.

IDSA - the Industrial Design Society of America - if you're an information worker, it's nice to take a break and consider some physical objects.



Design Observer from the Design Observer Group - browse this thought leadership, or if you only have time for one article, read Where We Work - "...if you think about the space where creative work actually gets done, and what writers and designers and quite a few artists are really looking at all day, the relevant framework is probably not a room, or a window. It’s probably a screen."

Yakage Okayama manhole cover（岡山県矢掛町のマンホール）by MRSY on Flickr