A Matter Of Degree

Review - Essential SharePoint 2010 - the SharePoint book with a focus on SharePoint Maturity

 

This review of Essential SharePoint 2010 is long overdue (the book came out at the end of August 2010), but since its release I've been developing a different perspective on SharePoint as a whole, and am excited to be able to review it now through that lens. 

The authors are Scott Jamison, Susan Hanley, and Mauro Cardarelli (this year with additional content from Chris Bortlik and Donal Conlon).  I was a big fan of their Essential SharePoint 2007, and recommended it to my colleagues and clients as a book that really took a business approach to the product and was targeted to the IT Professional, Project Manager, and Business Analyst rather than to developers or server administrators.  The 2010 version continues with that point of view.  In the authors' own words: "Most books are designed to address the "how" behind SharePoint... this book complements the typical SharePoint book with some of the "what" and "why" of SharePoint."  The book's focus on on planning and governance, including such tools as tables of "Mapping of SharePoint Features to General Business Objectives" and "Suggested SharePoint [Success] Metrics," are extremely useful for an IT Director, project leader, or anyone taking a consultative role on a SharePoint implementation. 

Now I am finding that this is one of the few books on the market, if not the only one, that supports a mature and optimized SharePoint implementation as much as a planfully well-founded one.  Part II comprises nearly 200 pages on implementing SharePoint "to its fullest potential."  Its sections on Search, Business Process, Business Intelligence, and Composites & Applications relate directly to these competencies in the SharePoint Maturity Model.  A SharePoint implentation owner could potentially improve his or her implementation's SharePoint Maturity several levels by reading and applying the informaton here - for example, the section on Search could take an implementation all the way through the 300 level (without any custom development).

In addition to the planning and foundational concepts, there is a good amount of beginner-to-intermediate-level how-to and hands-on which can really empower the business user - for example, how to design a workflow in Visio 2010 that can be imported into SharePoint.

To sum up, it's the perfect book for all those folks in the SharePoint community who DON'T identify themselves as developers or administrators - and it should be required reading for the folks who do!

You can get the hard copy here or the Kindle version here.



SharePoint Governance with an Integrative Focus

20091021 - Scott Jamison and Sue Hanley at the 2009 SharePoint Conference, originally uploaded by sadalit.

This morning I attended the session “SharePoint 2010 Governance Planning and Implementation” presented by Scott Jamison and Susan Hanley. They’re both dynamic, confident speakers with years of in-the-trenches experience, and their stories and passion about the subject actually make Governance concepts seem interesting and engaging.

Hanley said the most important thing in starting a far-reaching project like a SharePoint implementation is to think about “What am I trying to accomplish?” For example, it’s not good enough to say “We need social computing.” You need to know specifically what you want to get out of it. She urged the audience to think about the technology “not in IT terms but in business terms.”

This dovetails with one of the principles in the book The Opposable Mind, by Roger Martin, which I was reading on the flight to the conference. In the section “Specialization and its Discontents,” Martin says:

“Business’s dominant mode of specialization is the functional area – finance, marketing, production, sales, human resources, and the rest of the organizational chart. Each functional area has its own accepted range of salience, its own accepted causal relationships, its own training, its own insiders’ language, and itst own culture…. But specialists aren’t optimally suited suited to solve the biggest problems businesses face, because [as Peter Drucker pointed out], ‘there are no finance decisions, tax decisions, or marketing decisions; only business decisions.’”

Here are some of the ways, discussed by Hanley and Jamison in the session, to move away from a “specialized” view of your SharePoint implementation (i.e. “The Human Resources department needs an onboarding workflow,” or “The CFO wants dashboards,)” and move toward a more high-level, business-oriented perspective:

• Centralize your SharePoint service.
• Treat it like an enterprise application – have a corporate-level taxonomy and establish metrics for success.
• Have an executive sponsor.
• Divide SharePoint logically from the topmost level for all users, through divisional and team levels, down to individual contributors
• People can’t remember policies – so for successful governance system-wide, come up with catchy short phrases that people can remember. (Hanley’s example – “Send links, not documents.”)
• Provide a consistent user experience
• If the goal is knowledge management, default access should be “read” for everyone in the enterprise.

These ideas represent the kind of integrative thinking which Martin advocates in his book – not to let what is optimal for one sector of the business take precedence over what is optimal for the entire business. Approaching the system holistically and integratively is ultimately the path to success.


Switching gears: one surprising piece of the content for me was this recommendation:

• In SharePoint 2007, the best practice was: use metadata, not folders.
• In SharePoint 2010: use folders, inherit metadata.

I’ll need to learn more from these two experts and work a lot more with the product if I’m going to get over my anti-folder prejudice!