A Matter Of Degree

The SharePoint Maturity Model is One Year Old!

 

A year ago at this time, I had just finished developing a maturity model for SharePoint.  I was frustrated with the mostly tactical, technology-oriented conversations I kept hearing about SharePoint, and I believed this was a different take on SP that would be a useful community tool - but I had learned long ago, you never know for sure what will hit and what won't. 

With the support of Mark Miller and the folks at EUSP, I published the first version of the Model on 11/5/10.  Positive community response was immediate and so encouraging that I kept developing.

Now, one year later, I've gotten feedback on the Model from hundreds of SP community members, from end users to MVPs to Microsoft partners to Microsoft itself.  The list of the people I have to thank for their contributions, support, and encouragement has become too long to manage.  The Model has a dedicated website thanks to FPWeb, and I have a provisional patent and licensing agreement in place.  It has reached a global audience via articles, webcasts, podcasts, and in-person presentations not only by me but by other folks who see the value in this tool, and the data I had hoped for a year ago is building up, one assessment at a time.  In a few weeks I'll be releasing a Silverlight application on the site that will guide SP owners through a self-assessment, and generate a report on their maturity levels compared to the global average.

But with all this forward motion, I must acknowledge I'm not as far along as I'd wanted.  The list of improvements is still long - both for the model itself and the supporting materials.  Rather than being in love with my model, I see the need for continuous improvement and update.  I know it's at risk because it is complex, and it aims to be comprehensive, in a world of 140-character reduction and user-interface simplification.  But I still believe it's the best way right now to get a comprehensive view of a SharePoint implementation, and to create your organization's path forward.

I'm committed to keep going. So in the spirit of "if you tell someone, you'll have someone to hold you accountable," I want to share my vision for improvements to the SP Maturity Model in the coming year.  Some of them are carried over, some are new. 

• launch that assessment application
• make the experience of learning about SharePoint Maturity more interactive (by taking that overview PowerPoint presentation to the next level)
• incorporate Office365 and hosted solutions
• create the mapping for staffing / resources
• create the mapping to vendors
• prepare the Model for Office 15 / SP 2012
• continue the article series for SharePoint Magazine
• Last but not least, write a book on the subject.

Now - hold me accountable. And if there's anything that you'd like to see from the Model, or on the subject of SharePoint Maturity, that's not listed here, please let me know!  Thanks to everyone who contributed during Year One, and I look forward to another great year!

Why Intranet Adoption Is Like The Color White (or, Adoption Doesn't Exist)

Last week a client asked me, “How do we get better adoption?  It’s such a challenge.”  At this point I can’t count the number of times I’ve been asked how to improve adoption of SharePoint intranets or applications.  I have plenty of recommendations.  And I know that the number of presentations, training courses, articles and opinions out there on the subject are also beyond counting.  Clearly there’s a problem and the community is doing the best it can to address it.

When I was asked this last week for the nth time it came to me very clearly:

"Adoption" doesn’t exist.

At least, not the way most people think about it.  It’s not an entity or a competency on its own.   It’s not a feature or an endpoint with a well-defined set of characteristics.  It’s not an improvement or an upgrade that you can run like a project and dedicate attention and resources to as its own workstream.  

Think of the way the color white is made, which many of us learned in grade school or at a science museum:   the result of many colors of light added together.  

This is adoption.  The “white” at the center that can’t exist without all the other colors.

 

Original photo source:  Jared

These are the critical colors that need to be in place:

• Executive support – Has using the new system or tool been made a priority at the highest levels?
• Business alignment – Does the new system reflect how people actually get their work done every day, and does it improve that for them?
• Marketing / Communication / WIIFM – do the users know about changes in advance, and has it been sold to them why the change is good for them?
• Staffing, training, and support – Do the users know how to do what they need to do, and whom to contact when they hit a snag?
• Trusted infrastructure – What would make the users leave their desktops, email, file shares, etc. for something unknown?  Has it been proven to them that the new system is even more trustworthy than the old one?
• Dynamic, fresh content – Who is in charge of making sure that content is up to date, and do they have enough time to perform this function?
• Users have a voice – Increasingly, users want intranets to work the way the internet does. This could mean anything from voting and commenting on content, to uploading their own content, to sending feedback about a problem and/or making a suggestion.  Does your solution span the range?
• Usability – Is the system usable, more efficient than the way users worked before, and even appealing and beautiful?
• Accessibility / mobility – this isn’t only about mobile devices; it’s about whether people can connect quickly from home, and/or do their work on a plane or commuter train.  It’s about whether the folks in the warehouse or out in the field have a way to access the system. 

And there are likely many more than this (for example, Carrots and sticks – has the organization considered what to turn off (e.g. file shares) and what to light up (e.g. performance incentives) in order to drive behavior?). 

Put them all together, and you’ll have user adoption.  I grant you, this is much harder work than shining a collection of colored lights in the same spot.  But everyone, from the CIO to the content owner, needs to stop thinking about adoption as if it's something that can be affected in a vacuum.  It is the result of all the other efforts you make. 

And your efforts within your organization will be different from others - the mix of colors will almost never be the same from one to another (but that's an article for another time - Why Intranets Are Like Snowflakes):

Photo:  Geoffrey Drake-Brockman, Optobot, Detail

So if you're struggling with the adoption of your intranet sites or applications, remember that it can only exist as the result of a mix.

And for those of you who prefer a more retro look and feel, I reversed the time-honored prism poster and envisioned the mix as follows (click to see full size). 

Quick strategy briefing for project managers - tell the CIO that you're the prism.  ;)

Original photo source: Brittanica.com

The SharePoint Salon

Graphic courtesy of SoftArtisans

For the Boston area SharePoint crowd - the folks at SoftArtisans have started up a SharePoint Salon to discuss the latest and most challenging topics around this platform. Claire W., the organizer, ensures that a core group of local SP experts can attend, and then opens up the event to all.

The key point about the Salon, and what differentiates it from many other SP community events, is that it is all about conversation.  There's no lecturer, no slide show, just focused dialogue on subjects that matter.  Unlike a SharePint there's a topic to structure the interaction, and a guaranteed group of experts to keep the ball in the air. 

The third Salon is coming up on Thursday, October 27, at Eastern Standard, on the subject of data visualizations, KPIs, and the new Power View capability.  You can read about the event here, and respond if you will attend here.

My hope is that the Salon idea will spread and other geographic areas will start to have their own.  The product is so well-known and widely adopted now that we may be entering an era where it's less about expert-to-novice relationships and more about "all of us are smarter than any of us."

I hope to see you there!

Poll: Intranet Content Type Usefulness

Andrew over at the Worldwide Intranet Challenge has posted a quick poll on the usefulness of nine different intranet content types.  As of this writing there are over 200 responses, and so far the numbers indicate that users find KPIs and Archives/Records least useful, while Tools/Forms/Templates and Structured Content (i.e. staff directory, price list) are most useful.  (I disagree on the usefulness of KPI's; my opinion is that companies have not done enough work here to put this kind of content on their intranets, or to post it in a meaningful / easily accessible way, and therefore users are not seeing value.)

I encourage you to take this very quick poll and give Andrew the high-level feedback he's looking for.

SharePoint Conference 2011 - Day 1 - Keynotes - #spc11

I just came out of the SharePoint Conference Keynotes and wanted to share a few quick thoughts. 

First, a stack of statistics shared by the various speakers:

About the conference:
7500 attendees
240 sessions
200 partners/vendors
New track for end-user adoption (running lunch & breaks)

About SharePoint:
700,000 SP developers around the world
1162 books on SP (dev only?)
4x the visual designers for next version
Over 4,000 partners in SP ecosystem
93,000 people trained by partners on building solutions in SP
1,000 people just working on SP R&D  (implied: these are at MS)

General enterprise statistics - from DelBene Cloud keynote:
65% deploying at least one social software tool
84% of orgs have a remote workforce
70% of IT budgets spent maintaining inflexible & siloed systems
4 million millennials enter workforce each year

Next, my takeaway:

At the end of his keynote speech, Jeff Teper urged the audience - "Now don't you dare go home and say "I didn't know I could do that with SharePoint."

And the response of my colleague sitting next to me (a SP developer and administrator for a global company of 200,000 users, who gets my vote for Most Likely to Qualify for MS's New Certification "Microsoft Certified Architect for SharePoint" Without Taking Any Refresher Training) was:  "My users already know they can do that with SharePoint.  They want to know, 'Why can't I do that within my company?'  MS Access is not allowed, SharePoint Designer is not allowed..."

Which is a story I've heard from many different clients and community members, and which tells me that cultural issues remain one of the strongest factors influencing user satisfaction and adoption of SharePoint (and ultimately, its maturity within an organization).  And yet the track for end-user adoption, the "SharePoint Express," new to the conference this year, occurs only during lunch and breaks.  There are a few governance sessions at the conference; it will be interesting to see if they cover this problem of releasing control not only of SharePoint but of the complementary programs and systems that can make it a fully-realized solution for the users.

Recommended forum: Worldwide Intranet Challenge

If you have any part in owning or managing a SharePoint Intranet, I highly recommend Andrew Wright's Worldwide Intranet Challenge group on LinkedIn.  It's an active, well-managed group with great content, and does a good job of keeping the sales pitches out of the general forum.  Some of the posts are SharePoint-specific, and the vast majority of the rest deal with concepts that are platform-agnostic.  Here's a sampling of some of the recent discussions:

• What are your intranet's top-level navigation links, and why?
• How much control should Intranet managers have?
• Do you highlight user-generated content anywhere on your intranet?
• What social media options are you using for internal corporate communications?
• To which business unit does an intranet belong? HR? I.T.? Communications? And why?
• Looking for an analytics tool that can't pass info to an external server... what do you recommend?
• Why aren't intranets fulfilling their potential? What do you think?
• Now that intranets have moved from a straight content publishing model to a mix with collaboration and social media tools, how do you structure an information architecture ?

This is seriously good benchmarking for the Intranet owner who has needs beyond the technical.  For my day-to-day digest of what's top of mind for the community, I find this group more useful in many ways than some of the dedicated SharePoint groups.  From the list of members I can see that many of the consultants and practitioners I know and respect may share my opinion.  Nice work, Andrew!

Where To Find SharePoint Implementation Examples

My most recent Lijit stats email tells me that the top referring search term that brings readers to this blog is "SharePoint Implementation Examples."   This is one of the big questions on every SharePoint implementation owner's mind:  "What have others done?"

 

The bad news: I don't feature many examples in-depth on this blog.  The good news: I am amassing a store of case studies, screen shots, and resources on sharepointmaturity.com.  Currently there are two places on the site to look for resources:

1. Gallery of screenshots of intranet sites - A small but growing collection of SharePoint sites and applications that I envision will be as comprehensive as the collection of public-facing sites over at wssdemo.

2. Links to external resources - A list of sites that present intranet case studies, screen shots, and guidance on intranet design.  Not all the intranets featured here are based on SharePoint but many are.

If you are aware of great resources I can add to either list, please leave a comment and let me know!

 

Choose Your Resource: Two visualizations of the Business Intelligence Options in SharePoint 2010

[Update 9/3/11 - both charts have been edited to reflect Derek's input (see comments)]

I've been wanting to share this SharePoint resource for a while: two different views of the options for Business Intelligence / Data Visualization on the 2010 platform.  Both views break down the options in terms of dataset size and dynamic vs. static presentation; you can choose the format that works best for you:

2010 BI Solutions - Venn View:

 

2010 BI Solutions - Quadrant View:

  

My thanks to Chris McNulty, whose matrix of different BI options in SP 2010 provided the seed for these visualizations (the matrix can be seen on slide 28 of our joint presentation "See Beyond The Numbers"), and to Matt Jackson, who suggested the quadrant view and provided input on both views.

As always, I welcome feedback and suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who made the first SharePoint Saturday The Conference in DC a success! #spstcdc

 

[note: this is cross-posted on bluemetal.com]

I wanted to thank the 2,000 attendees, 190 speakers, 150 volunteers, and 60 sponsors who came out to SharePoint Saturday The Conference in DC this past weekend - the first multi-day event of its kind in the SharePoint community.  I was honored to be a part of it.  What other event spans the range from deep-dive technical sessions to executive-level workshops AND inclues a talent show?

For those who weren't able to attend, there's still an opportunity to learn!  Marc Anderson will be presenting a free, live webinar tomorrow, 8/16, on how he built "The SPSTCDC Web Site Speakers and Sessions Pages."  It's at 2 PM EDT.

You can view my presentation on Assessing Your SharePoint Maturity here.

See the following for more about this great conference:

The tweetstream

Wrap-up post from the conference organizers

Lessons Learned from Dux Raymond Sy

Videos from the talent show

Thanks again everyone, great job!

 

Bacon-savers, Inaugural Post: SharePoint Group Calendar Workaround by Thomas Zepeda McMillan

Today, right now, I'm starting a new series of blog posts on the people I mentally call the "bacon-savers."  These are the folks whose blog posts I find, or whose advice I receive, when I'm sweating over an issue and leave me thinking, "wow, that person really saved my bacon."  I want to do more than just leave a comment somewhere, so I'm going to start reaching out with some props.

I just encountered the frustrating issue with the Group Calendar in SharePoint 2010.  You most likely already know that the SP 2010 calendar gives you the choice to "Use this calendar to share member's schedule", and this choice allows contributors to invite other people to SP calendar events, and display free/busy information for selected people.

 
You may also already know that the problem is with that "add person" functionality.  There is no way to enter people and save them so that the calendar continually displays their information.  Every time you leave the view, your selections are wiped out.  For anyone who wants to display a team's time off schedule or free/busy information on a site, the existing functionality does not help at all.

You can review the following discussion threads to see the level of frustration this has caused:

• Group Calendar looses People (TechNet)
• Group Calendar View (Social Technet - SharePoint 2010 Forums)
• SharePoint 2010 Work Group Calendar (MSDN)
• "Group Week" view of calendar does not save list of members (Social MSDN - SharePoint 2010 Forums)

That fourth forum is where I found McMillan's solution. He did all the work of tracking down how the entities are added, and used jquery to define resources in the group view.  A commenter, Sylvain, provided the code to define people.  It worked perfectly for me in a demo environment.  While we wait for MS to address this, this is an awesome workaround.

Thomas Zepeda McMillan, thank you for saving my bacon.