A Matter Of Degree

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

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!

SharePoint Maturity Self-Assessment App is Live!



I'm thrilled to share the news that my team at BlueMetal has completed development of a beta version of an online self-assessment application for the SharePoint Maturity Model! 
 
The purpose of the app is to make it easier for you to do a self-assessment on the maturity of your SharePoint implementation.  After you step through the competencies and choose your levels, it generates a report of your results, and an additional report of those results compared to the global average:

You can print and share this report with your team, and use it as a resource as you're building your roadmap for future enhancements to your implementation.

No registration or login is required to take the assessment - just click the link and begin!  Any identifying information you provide will be kept completely confidential. 

We're especially excited because it's a completely Cloud-based solution, with the Silverlight front end living on a hosted SharePoint site (thanks to the folks at FPWeb), and the data stored in Azure.  It was truly a team effort to produce, and I want to thank all the folks at BlueMetal who participated, as well as my distinguished panel of beta-testers, who are all well-known experts in the SharePoint community.  Special recognition goes to Julie Turner, who built the application, and without whom it would not have been possible.

I'll be at SPTechCon San Francisco all week, where I'll be presenting three sessions as well as celebrating the launch of Mark Miller's book SharePoint 2010 at Work, released to print yesterday, which includes my chapter on SharePoint Maturity.  If you'll be at the conference too, let's connect!   And whether or not you're in San Francisco this week, I encourage you to find your levels, get your report, and build your roadmap to greater SharePoint maturity!

SharePoint Maturity chapter in O'Reilly's upcoming "SharePoint 2010 At Work"

Mark Miller has pulled together The Best of End User SharePoint in book form. O'Reilly Publications will publish EUSP's most popular articles for an upcoming book: SharePoint 2010 at Work - Tricks, Traps, and Bold Opinions.

The book will include the following chapters:

• Taming the Elusive Calculated Column-Logic by Dessie Lunsford
• Charting for SharePoint by Alexander Bautz
• Data View Web Part, The Basics - Add a Hyperlink by Laura Rogers
• JQuery to the Rescue by Jim Bob Howard
• Quote of the Day Web Part by Waldek Mastykarz
• A Global Navigation Solution Across Site Collections by Peter Allen
• Empower the Power User by Kerri Abraham
• The SharePoint Maturity Model by Sadie Van Buren
• Unlocking the Mysteries of the Data View Web Part by Marc Anderson
• SharePoint 2010 Tab Page by Peter Allen
• Combine Documents and Website Links in One SharePoint Library by Eric Alexander

The book will be released in February 2012 in both hard copy and online versions. To receive a copy at a 40% discount, follow this link to the O'Reilly site to get more information, and use MILLERSP as the discount code.

SharePoint Maturity and how it corresponds to the Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in a webinar, moderated by Derek Weeks of OpenText Global 360, to discuss the results of the latest survey "How Are Businesses Using Microsoft SharePoint In The Enterprise?"  It was a great discussion, with Sue Hanley and Dave Coleman joining me as panelists.  I wanted to follow up on the webinar with some data from the SharePoint Maturity Model that corresponds with the survey results.

A few items to note:

• The demographics of the companies who've gone through the SharePoint Maturity assessment are quite similar to those who responded to the survey (see Slide 7 of the webinar presentation) - a wide range of company sizes, industries, and geographical locations.
• The maturity levels mentioned below are defined here on sharepointmaturity.com.

Training

One of the first competencies in the survey that maps to the SP Maturity Model is Training (see Slide 22 of the webinar). According to the survey:

•     44% of companies responded they do not have a training program,
•     13% responded that they are dissatisfied with their training options,
•     37% responded they are satisfied/comfortable,
•     6% that they are Very Satisfied. 

Looking at the SharePoint Maturity data, the overall average for Staffing and Training is 340 - or about the midpoint of the maturity scale (where content owners from some functional areas are trained on the system).  This improves with time - 1-3 years of SharePoint use averages in the 200s (training is informal or ad-hoc, in other words no training program), and 5-9 years of use averages in the 400s (multiple training offerings exist).

Given the relationship of training to adoption, I think there's a lot of opportunity here for organizations to evaluate their SharePoint training offerings early in their implementation cycle, and to put a training plan together (so that they can answer that survey question differently next time!).  This doesn't have to mean hiring resources to run a formal training program; it could be as simple as some embedded videos around the intranet, a custom Help file, some power users who can make themselves available for questions, etc.

Integration

The next competency in the model that aligns with the survey is Integration (see slide 42 of the webinar).  The survey asked "Are you exposing legacy or other application data?"

• 18% access their data through a separate interface
• 9% respond that SP data is integrated into a different system and pulled by users from that system
• 34% access some legacy data through SharePoint
• 7% access all legacy and new data via a single interface in SP
• 28% say data to SharePoint is not currently available
• 3% responded "other"

To me, these results indicate that at least 46% of the respondents' data and/or systems have no integration point with SharePoint, other than perhaps a link to external systems.  In terms of maturity assessments, organizations' average rating is 216 overall (where a single system is integrated with SharePoint, aside from Active Directory).  Organizations fall in the high 100s to low 200s for 1-5 years of SharePoint use, and from 200 to the low 300s for 6-9 years of use.

Although integration is a more complex undertaking than some of the other SharePoint competencies, it also has a bearing on adoption and user satisfaction, and directly affects an organization's ability to get to the next level in terms of business intelligence and insight.  In the next survey I'd love to see that 28% number go down.

Search

Survey respondents rated the most beneficial SP capability to be "Improved content search and navigation across site collection boundaries" (see slide 46 of the webinar) - which I am classifying in the Search competency.  While it's great that organizations are enjoying improved findability, there is still a lot of potential here - overall the maturity rating for Search is 191.  Maturity levels remain low over many years of use with no discernible trend toward greater maturity.  As Sue Hanley pointed out during the webinar, one of the keys to search issues is that SEARCH LITERACY IS NOT PERVASIVE among users.  This should be one of the facets of any SharePoint training program.

Business Process

The final competency addressed by the survey is Business Process - and here the survey maps the question directly to the five maturity levels (thanks Derek!).  Here's how the survey responses compare to the maturity assessments I've received:

		Fall 2011 SharePoint Survey	Maturity Assessments
Initial	100	42%	34%
Managed	200	37%	25%
Defined	300	12%	29%
Predictable	400	5%	5%
Optimizing	500	5%	6%
		101%	100%

The consistency of the 400 and 500 level responses make it clear how few organizations are really optimizing business processes in SharePoint.  When these results are layered with data for years of use, a steady progression is evident, however even the longest users and largest organizations are not hitting the 400 mark on average.

It's great to have this growing body of data both from the SharePoint Survey and from the maturity assessments that continue to come in.  I'm confident that we'll see improvement over the years.  Thanks again to Derek, Sue and Dave for a great conversation!

Resources:

Recording of the 11/30/11 webinar with Derek Weeks, Dave Coleman, Sue Hanley, and me

Slides from the 11/30/11 webinar

2011 and 2011 survey results - whitepaper versions

The SharePoint Maturity Model and data



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!

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.

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!

 

Discouraging? Scornful? Obstructive? Negligent? What are your hidden stages of SharePoint Maturity?

A few weeks ago a colleague sent me a link to the Localization Maturity Model by GALA, the Globalization & Localization Association.  As a lover of anything that has five stages and/or the word "maturity," I was happy to read it, and the aspect I found most compelling was the notion of the pre-stages of maturity, represented in their model by negative numbers:

 

Source:  The Localization Maturity Model

Since then I've been doing a lot of thinking about how this applies to my own maturity model for SharePoint.  The folks at GALA got it right - the path to maturity for any competency doesn't start when you self-assess at level 100.  It starts long before then and may include some uncomfortable and confusing twists and turns before you arrive at those clearly marked steps upward.

I've got some ideas about what these pre-steps are for SharePoint Maturity, but I'd love to hear from others about their experiences.  I'll be polling the attendees and speakers at the upcoming SharePoint Saturday Conference in Washington, DC this weekend, and in the meantime, if you'd like to share some descriptors of pre- or anti-SharePoint-maturity, please leave a comment - and feel free to have fun and be creative!

[Update 8/15/11 - Marc D. Anderson did so much thinking about this subject, it turned into its own blog.  Catch his Chasm of Despair post here.]