Portal Quiz: What is WSRP?
February 5, 2010 at 4:23 pm | In Fun, Standards, portals | Leave a CommentOK, it’s time for a portal quiz: What is WSRP?
Possible answers:
A. A Spanish-language AM radio station in Jacksonville, North Carolina
B. The Republican party state branch covering Microsoft headquarters
C. Web Services for Remote Portlets
D. A research project related to the biblical times of West Semitic peoples
It’s a trick question of course – they’re all true. If you don’t believe me, see here, here, here, and here (for a fascinating treasure map from biblical times called the “Copper Scroll”!).
Well, now that I lay it out that way, my chosen topic for today – the Web Services for Remote Portlets standard – seems pretty boring. But I’ll try to carry on. A rating category called “standards support” has found its way into most portal evaluations I’ve ever helped with. And WSRP support is usually on there. Things get murkier when I ask what they really plan on doing with it: “Well, we’re very into standards here … architectural guidance to use web services … there are a few different portal products in house that we may need to talk together …”
Unfortunately, WSRP shouldn’t just be a quick checkbox item on evaluations. WSRP can be useful, but in a limited set of use cases where it applies. And even if one of those use cases applies, you’ll also need guidance on how security, trust, UI frameworks, and optional services should be used. Usually if you’re just trying to solve portal proliferation problems, developing RESTful services for applications (or RSS/Atom for content) and then writing “last mile” portlets for each portal works better.
So what are those use cases where WSRP makes sense? I did some digging and found three that hold water:
1. Syndicating a Branded Portlet to Users on Platforms Outside The Syndicator’s Control: This is where it’s not enough to just make the information easily usable in multiple portals, but the branding with it (the exact style, layout, colors, etc) is important too. But keep in mind that there are other choices (like Flash) if branding or formatting integrity—not the formalism associated with a portlet—is all you need.
2. Developing a “Portal of Portals”: If you want to create a new portal from portlets of existing portals, you could use WSRP wrappers to do this.
3. Exposing Portlets from Another Platform the Development Team Doesn’t Know: Are you Java based and your .NET programmers won’t talk to you? Have them give you WSRP portlets instead of Web Parts and you’ll get along much better.
Now that I’m done with WSRP, you can get on to finding that ancient treasure. Let’s see … “In the Second Enclosure, in the underground passage that looks east…”
An End Run Around IT? Nope, Not Us …
January 29, 2010 at 2:14 pm | In Information Work, Microsoft SharePoint | 2 CommentsIn a previous posting (“Solution for Broken IT: Fix It“) I decried a trend I’ve noticed towards businesses taking collaboration and content needs into their own hands (via end user computing, consultants, or SaaS) rather than attempting to fix the relationship with IT. One example I noted was with SharePoint, where I said “Microsoft is increasingly marketing SharePoint to the business with as the DIY option of choice.”
Well, Microsoft denies any formal program to market SharePoint directly to the business (doing an end run around IT). But business folks are indeed getting pelted with SharePoint messaging from somewhere. Where is it? Entrepreneurial local technical salespeople? Active user’s groups? Self-appointed internal SharePoint evangelists? I’m not sure, but I wish I had the time to put on a disguise (a fake moustache and trench coat would do), hang out in a corporate business unit for a while complaining about how I wish I had a better way to collaborate than shared drives, and then catch whoever pops out of the woodwork …
SharePoint Governance Definitions Evolve
January 14, 2010 at 10:12 am | In Governance, Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration, portals | Leave a Comment2009 was the year that governance really took off in the SharePoint community as evidenced by SharePoint conference presentations, user’s group presentations, and bloggers. It’s been a major part of my conversations with clients and presentations to audiences using SharePoint since 2003, but I’ve never seen the energy around this topic that I have in the past year. That’s wonderful since I’ve observed that SharePoint installations that address governance upfront tend to have a much higher success rate.
Most governance conversations and presentations start from the definition to anchor the subject and then use it as a structure to drill into its portions. The community has mostly settled on some combination of the 3 goals and 3 tools in my definition, as outlined in our SharePoint Planning and Governance workshop:
Website governance uses people, policy, and process to resolve ambiguity, manage short- and long-range goals, and mitigate conflict within an organization.
Over the years I’ve been happy to see my approach picked up by the SharePoint community via Microsoft and Joel Oleson. It can now be found in places as diverse as Tech Ed Africa, SharePoint Magazine on Facebook, IronWorks , Robert Bogue, Michael Sampson’s blog, and Sean Stecker of Ensynch.
And other guidance from our workshop (like how “SharePoint often overlaps with other installed applications in particular capabilities”, how use policy is about “what constitutes abuse or misuse of SharePoint” and provides “clear instructions on how and when users should work with SharePoint”, my definitions of the centralized/decentralized/federated models) has now crept into the standard decks Microsoft provides to the SharePoint community (usually without acknowledgement, but I’m sure there’s silent appreciation there!).
The definition has even taken on a life of its own by evolving in a few directions, and – aside from the shameless chest thumping above – that’s what I’d like to provide my thoughts on today.
One evolution I’ve seen is to add “to define a service” to the definition. I really like the application of service methodologies to SharePoint and have been doing quite a bit of research in this area. My 2007 workshop applied ITIL v3 to SharePoint and my paper on using ITIL to define “SharePoint as a Service” comes out in January. Still, I’ve decided to focus on service definition as a management issue rather than a governance one (more on that here).
Another evolution I see as more dangerous. A fourth tool snuck in at some point: technology. There are plenty of other SharePoint documents that will focus on technology, such as maintenance manuals, administrator’s guides, tuning guides, etc. Technology is a third rail of SharePoint governance. I tried injecting it for a short time and quickly backed off after seeing the energy it sucked out of the other 3 tools. It provides a slippery slope that enables those uncomfortable with the political and diplomatic challenges of defining people, policy, and process to focus on technology instead. Also, you have different audiences and authors for technical docs versus the statement of governance so it’s best to leave that separate.
Long Time, No Post
January 5, 2010 at 11:41 pm | In Analyst biz | Leave a CommentYes, your blog reader is still working. I just haven’t posted in a while as I took a lot of vacation around the holidays. I’ll get back to blogging soon.
In the meantime, you may have heard that Gartner acquired Burton Group. Big news, but surprisingly little changes for me right now. Still working on the same research (a first look at SharePoint 2010 as applicable to creating enterprise portals) … with the same deadlines looming …
Shooting at Information Overload: Right Target, Wrong Weapon
December 9, 2009 at 9:06 am | In Attention Management, Information Work, interruption science | 2 CommentsTom Davenport’s “The Attention Economy” is the best information overload/attention management book I’ve read so far (despite several flaws). For that reason alone I avoided obvious, snarky rebuttal titles for this blog post such as “Why We Don’t Care What Davenport Thinks About Information Overload” or just “Why We Don’t Care About Tom Davenport”.
But I don’t agree with his posting yesterday about “Why We Don’t Care About Information Overload“. Like a good writer, he summarizes his point best at the end:
the next time you hear someone talking or read someone writing about information overload, save your own attention and tune that person out. Nobody’s ever going to do anything about this so-called problem, so don’t overload your own brain by wrestling with the issue.
I’m guessing his goal was to agitate and get people thinking by presenting a stark point of view. He succeeded. His post brings up a number of issues
I too have written that there are often better things to focus on than information overload, such as attention management in general. “How should I make the most of the ever-increasing amount of information at my fingertips?” is the correct, attention management question to ask. Not “How do I reduce information overload?” or “How do I deal with the avalanche …”.
But I have also written in opposition to the nihilism that Mr. Davenport presents here and that is frequent in the hand-wringing treatises of the information overload crowd. There are key people in any organization that can take real action that improves the information abilities of many information workers.
He also makes the point that people won’t take the time to tune their information channels:
We could if we wanted to. How many of us bother to tune our spam filters? How many of us turn off the little evanescent window in Outlook that tells us we have a new email? Who signs off of social media because there’s just too much junk? Who turns off their BlackBerry or iPhone in meetings to ensure no distractions? Nobody, that’s who — or very few souls anyway.
In the presentations I’ve given on this topic, I devote a slide to this question and make the point that people will act when the cost of action exceeds the price of inaction. That may take a while, but if people are indeed annoyed enough they’ll figure out how to do something. And here’s my post on how to turn off the new email window in Outlook.
A final quibble: While attacking information overload, he adopts the same guru-tense “we” that his targets use. I’m not sure why so many people on both sides of this issue feel the need to speak for all of society when they talk (as I mentioned here). Do “we” care about information overload? Speak for yourself or those you know, but it is inappropriate to imply “it’s all of us (we) against just you”.
There are some good comments to his posting. One accuses him of misstating the audience member’s question so he could rant about information overload. Funny, but, if true, all too common. Once someone has a rant, it’s hard not to twist topics to hit it.
Another commenter (Lonny Eachus) wrote “Information overload is not spam. Spam is spam. Information overload, as it has been defined for decades now, is simply the vast amount of information that you have to deal with, in order to be successful in today’s world. It has little or nothing to do with spam.” I have studied this field for quite a while and haven’t actually heard that redefinition of information overload. I can see a slippery slope with the redefinition in that the large proportion of that vast information that doesn’t lead to action or insight can be defined as a kind of spam, so it’s turtles all the way down. Besides, I’ll let Basex and the Information Overload Research Group define information overload, which certainly does include interruptions, banal messages (if not spam), and other messages that get in the way of insight.
Solution for Broken IT: Fix It
November 23, 2009 at 4:36 pm | In Governance, Microsoft SharePoint | 1 CommentI’ve been noticing a distinct anti-IT trend in vendor marketing lately. There has always been dissatisfaction with IT for everything from failure to understand business needs to technical elitism. But there are more options now for business units that want to get around IT. Especially for the technologies I cover: collaboration and content.
What are those options? Business units can avoid IT in roughly three ways:
- Do it yourself (aka “end user computing”)
- Hire outside contractors/consultants
- Software as a service
For example, Microsoft is increasingly marketing SharePoint to the business with as the DIY option of choice. With SharePoint 2010 coming out and their marketing machine in full gear, I am getting lots of comments from IT folks that their business partners are attending an external SharePoint seminar or have had sales people contact them directly. As one poignant example, I did an onsite governance workshop for an organization where SharePoint was growing separately in IT and the biggest business unit. Getting them on the same page would be useful, but unfortunately the business units couldn’t attend because they were all at a SharePoint training class they had enrolled in without IT! This is new – I haven’t seen anything remotely close to this end user push before.
SaaS and cloud offerings have pushed this button too. By just writing a check, capabilities can be delivered without a painful round of requirements gathering or project approval process.
I can’t blame vendors for doing this. There are perfectly good reasons to avoid IT that don’t amount to IT bashing. End user computing can enable the business to iterate on its own with the subject matter experts in control. SaaS can be more cost efficient and lower risk than a large IT installation. Consultants help even out peaks and valleys in workload without layoffs, and provide niche expertise. Hey, IT can be happy to work on the difficult problems that demand its skills while leaving the business to help itself for lesser needs.
All of these reasons are evident in Microsoft’s marketing for one SharePoint’s main capability areas, composites. “Composites – Business users need the ability to quickly create applications without involving the corporate IT group for each request.” Wondering why? Well, in the SharePoint 2010 guide handed out at the SharePoint conference, it goes further and describes how the line of business has custom needs that often result in IT becoming a bottleneck. “This common scenario results in a backlog of increasingly unmet needs in the IT group … By enabling users and decision makers to create [composites] it becomes easier to improve productivity along with the satisfaction in the organization of the company’s IT staff.” (sorry, can’t find a link to it online)
To me, it’s all a matter of intent. Using end user computing, external consultants, or SaaS when they are truly better alternatives than a properly working IT department is the right thing to do. But if the business is not happy with the service they get from IT (e.g., too busy, too bureaucratic, too incompetent), the first course of action, before figuring out how to do it themselves or write a check to someone else, should be to fix IT.
My suspicion is that there is often a combination of these two intents at play. Before the business gets too excited about getting needs met without IT involvement and before IT gets too excited about getting to ignore a swath of the business, a realistic assessment should first determine if something is broken .
Self-governance
November 18, 2009 at 9:33 pm | In Governance | Leave a CommentGovernance doesn’t have to be paternal and forced on groups by higher powers. Here’s a quote from an article in the Oct 15th 2009 issue of the Economist (“Reality bites“):
In 40 years of studying how common resources—from lobster fisheries in Maine to irrigation systems in Nepal—are actually managed by communities, Ms Ostrom found that people often devise rather sophisticated systems of governance to ensure that these resources are not overused. These systems involve explicit rules about what people can use, what their responsibilities are, and how they will be punished if they break the rules. In particular, she found that self-governance often worked much better than an ill-informed government taking over and imposing sometimes clumsy, and often ineffective, rules.
I haven’t read Ostrom’s research, but I’m guessing that self-governance meant that governance occurs between small groups, not that every individual is self-governing. That’s an interesting finding, since governance is often assumed to be top-down and bureaucratic. But it doesn’t have to be. According to my governance definition, the goal of governance is to to resolve ambiguity, manage short- and long-range goals, and mitigate conflict within an organization. A higher level authority may not be required to address these goals if a community can do it themselves. Indeed, if the higher power doesn’t know enough about what they are governing to put good rules in place, it’s better to simply give the group a mandate to put people, process, and policy in place, but to let them create their own rules.
Countervailing Wisdom for SharePoint
November 18, 2009 at 9:53 am | In Governance, ITIL, Management, Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration | 1 CommentIn April of 2008, we released our advanced SharePoint workshop that describes how to offer “SharePoint as a service” by applying ITIL v3 to SharePoint. Alas, it’s taken a while to start publishing this methodology in document form, but I just submitted the first paper on this subject. It’s called “ITIL for SharePoint: Defining SharePoint as a Service using ITIL Service Strategy” and is due out in January.
Writing this document forced me to dig deeper into ITIL’s best practices. Many of them transfer directly to SharePoint (like much of the operations and service desk parts), so I didn’t want to waste time just restating them with the word “SharePoint” in front. And some don’t really apply at all, since SharePoint isn’t the type of service that ITIL was originally created for. But by picking carefully through the best practices (and sometimes reshaping them to fit) a few real gems emerge. Those are the ones I concentrate on in the paper and workshop.
In the process of writing my paper, several points became clear that go against the countervailing wisdom I’ve seen among SharePoint implementers.
Trying to squeeze the most from your SharePoint investment is probably not good for the company
What could possibly be wrong about trying to get the most return from your investment in SharePoint? What matters is the ROI of the company, not the ROI of a product. Just because SharePoint can do something doesn’t mean it’s the best tool the organization has to accomplish that task. As a parallel, the ROI on my $40 cordless screwdriver would increase if I used it for drilling all the drywall holes for my basement remodeling since it’s squeezing more benefit for the same investment. But that’s still silly if I have a corded electric drill nearby that’s much more efficient. When organizations get too excited about SharePoint, they risk cannibalizing value from other systems to the detriment of the overall collaboration portfolio.
Value is different than ROI
Conventional wisdom has convinced many SharePoint implementers that no metric can prove its worth better than the return on investment (ROI). After all, it’s actual dollars made compared to dollars spent – how much more real can it get? However, ITIL’s approach reframes the value equation quite elegantly by avoiding common SharePoint ROI problems (like the difficulty of proving the numbers and the distortion that perception introduces). What ITIL reveals is that SharePoint service providers need to focus on the portfolio’s combination of utility (what it provides) and warranty (that it is available to provide it) to ensure that value is achieved.
Management is different than governance
Governance is very important. I’ve dedicated significant portion of the last 6 years instructing everyone from Microsoft to government institutions to large corporations on how to apply governance to SharePoint. But management represents a separate pillar that is just as important. Executed properly, governance will provide the organizational and procedural structure that management requires to succeed. While practitioners conventionally blend management guidance into governance docs and use the terms interchangeably, there is a clear line separating them and two distinct efforts are required.
Offering SharePoint as a business service is fundamentally different than offering it as a set of technological capabilities
SharePoint demos like an app and it is tempting to treat it like an app, but more organizations are finding it’s really infrastructure. Steve Ballmer at the SharePoint conference finally used the “P” word: platform. So SharePoint is collaboration and content infrastructure. But users use applications. A service delivery methodology bridges that gap by packaging technical services into business services.
Users of SharePoint shouldn’t know what SharePoint is
Why does a business user need to know what SharePoint is? Conventional wisdom pushes the importance of “lunch and learns”, training plans, and rollouts. These are all fine as long as they are not for SharePoint. Proper service delivery will yield business services carefully crafted for particular uses. Those services are what the users need to understand. If an end user is asked if their company uses SharePoint in my ideal service delivery organization, they would answer “I don’t know. Never heard of it. But we do have a great Lab Research Tracking tool …” (where the tracking tool is a customized SharePoint list and template). Even though end users should be able to help themselves with SharePoint, that can mean end users initiate their own instance of the Lab Research Tracking workspace, not that they create it from scratch. And the service delivery methodology can stretch to include local service delivery points so that business services can be provided without having to contact IT or wait in their queue.
“Driving adoption” is a band aid for poor demand management
Conventional wisdom touts the importance of driving adoption before, during, and after rollout of SharePoint. “If you don’t drive adoption, you’ll fail to achieve the full potential of SharePoint”. Nonsense. A study of ITIL’s demand management process forced me to rethink this wisdom and realize that it is all backwards. If you took the time upfront to understand what the business needs and deliver it, you wouldn’t have to convince, cajole, or lure them to use your system. And the education required would be less as well since it would be targeted to business services rather than general purpose usage. End user self help can work once you attract users with specific business templates, after which adoption comes naturally rather than require “driving”.
Internally, SharePoint always has competition; users always have a choice
ITIL demand management recommends evaluating competition as a best practice. While it is written to apply to other external service providers, reframing it as internal competition yields important insight. E-mail will remain a substitute good for much of what SharePoint does. Competing – but disconnected – SharePoint installations can occur. And SaaS options abound.
The process of applying a service methodology has value for the organization beyond just the end result
Conventional project plans have governance and management as “something that needs to be done”, when actually they are “something that needs to be learned”. The process of implementing ITIL has many side benefits including better communication with the business, higher value, and knowledge that can help with other domains.
How Star Trek Informs SharePoint Governance Models
October 30, 2009 at 2:55 pm | In Fun, Governance, Microsoft SharePoint, portals | Leave a CommentI just got back from an onsite visit to help a client work through their SharePoint governance issues, which includes talking about picking the appropriate spot on the governance continuum. This is almost always some form of federation. My definition of federation is “Groups in an organization recognize a central authority’s right to set high-level policy but retain the freedom to make their own decisions within the bounds of that policy.”
I’ve been asked before if federation can exist without a central authority. I realize in some technical domains the word “federation” is used that way, like with P2P federation. But for this domain, federation does imply a central authority.
When talking about federation and governance, my model is federalism, which the U.S. was founded on. Wikipedia calls federalism 
“is a political philosophy in which a group of members are bound together (Latin: foedus, covenant) with a governing representative head.” That’s how I seem to remember it from Social Studies class too, although that was a long time ago.
For final proof, please note the definition of perhaps the best known, most advanced federation: The United Federation of Planets. According to the Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki: “The United Federation of Planets (abbreviated as UFP and commonly referred to as The Federation) was an interstellar federal republic, composed of planetary governments that agreed to exist semi-autonomously under a single central government based on the principles of universal liberty, rights, and equality, and to share their knowledge and resources in peaceful cooperation and space exploration.”
BTW – Apparently the UFP had an anthem too. Click here to hear it.
Note: This is a cross-posting from the Collaboration and Content Strategies blog.
Want an Aurally Pristine Environment While Flying? Try the Cockpit
October 27, 2009 at 7:31 am | In Attention Management | Leave a CommentDo you want an aurally pristine environment while flying on your next trip? One where you can press a few buttons and silence all distractions from the outside world so you can focus on your laptop in uninterrupted peace? No, it’s not first class. It’s the cockpit.
Some attention management analysis seems to be needed in cockpits these days. I wrote previously about the danger of distracted driving, as demonstrated in a series of articles in the New York Times. But how could I overlook the dangers of distracted flying?
The Wall St. Journal reports today “Laptops Cited for Pilot Inattention“. The Journal reports “they were poring over their personal laptops in the cockpit while frantic air-traffic controllers were trying to establish contact.” Furthermore “according to some pilots, members of other crews have even been known to play DVDs on laptops in the cockpit to pass the time on particularly long overwater and international flights.”
Personally, I have mixed results working on my laptop on flights. And even if I have headphones on, I’m constantly distracted by various dinging and overly loud announcements on the speakers. But now I’m being told that pilots work in an aurally pristine environment? It must be nice, far from the roaring engines, no cart bashing their elbows, no crying babies, no smelly sandwiches being opened nearby, no seatbacks in their face, the only snoring coming from your co-pilot (actually, I’m in favor of controlled napping to shift alertness to critical maneuvering times). I’m rather jealous. And surprised that critical alerts and audio from all sources can seemingly be shut off with a volume knob or taking off their headsets.
My enterprise attention management conceptual architecture describes the concept of channel switching in positive terms – that rules and routing can be used to redirect messages from the channel their sender intended to better fit the needs of the recipient. But it also seems that channel switching was part of the flight 188 mishap. The pilots were distracted right as a message was sent to switch the communication channel. After missing it, presumably they weren’t hearing traffic control. I’m amazed that a message is sent that communication will now switch to another channel and, without receiving confirmation from the listener, all communication now switches. Perhaps waiting for a “roger that” is not part of the protocol for flight control messages such as “everything I now say to you for the rest of the flight will now be on another channel. I hope you were listening to that. Bye.”
Obviously there’s a lot I don’t know about flying, and the situation here. In fact, there’s a lot the authorities can’t tell about this situation either. But as someone who puts on a lot of flight miles and studies attention management and interruption science, the things I’m hearing don’t give me a lot of confidence.
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