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.
Free SharePoint Governance Poster
October 24, 2009 at 3:07 pm | In Governance, Microsoft SharePoint | Leave a CommentI just got back from Vegas where I presented on what SharePoint governance is (and isn’t) and how to create a SharePoint statement of governance. If you went to the conference, your logon will grant you access to the video in a few days I’m told. I’m not sure if or how it will be available to non-attendees.
For those who have seen/heard me present on governance before at one of our workshops or client briefings, there are a few enhancements I’ve made to my materials. They are:
1. Clarifying that my definition is a domain-specific definition, not a dictionary definition. I believe it tracks closely to what many have written about IT governance and is meant to provide guidance, not merely say “the act of controlling people.” or something like that.
2. The relation of the statement of governance to other documents that exist such as the maintenance manual, standards listings, and IT governance. Not just drawing lines between them, but showing how they relate and enhance each other.
3. The difference between governance and management (yes, there is a difference – and I didn’t make this one up!)
4. Announcement that my poster on “Creating a SharePoint Statement of Governance” is now free from the Burton Group website. Go to Free Resources and look for the link to the poster. Free registration is required.
Reflecting on the Winding Path of SharePoint
October 20, 2009 at 12:25 pm | In Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration, portals | Leave a CommentAt his keynote address at the SharePoint Conference, Steve Ballmer acknowledged that 10 years ago, if they had written up a list of what SharePoint is supposed to be on paper, that wouldn’t be what it is today. “Your feedback and input … the way you’ve driven us” has made SharePoint what it is today, thank you very much. For example, Internet-facing sites were not an original design point. In the same vein, Tom Rizzo said that SharePoint has been such a success that Microsoft has been overwhelmed.
Why?
Why is it the case that something far beyond a shared folder replacement couldn’t be envisioned in 1999 when Lotus Notes had already been around for years? Why did that feedback take ten years to result in better top down management and control that every serious portal product mostly had in 2003 and certainly in 2007? Why weren’t internet sites a design point, particularly when many of the stopping blocks (like limits on list sizes, farm management, and scalability) were also hassles for large intranet deployments as well? And why wasn’t Microsoft more optimistic ( = prepared) for SharePoint’s success given the history of Notes and early Plumtree success? This lack of optimism probably resulted in the 2003 and 2007 releases of SharePoint getting less R&D effort and sales attention than they deserved.
It’s easy to be a Monday morning quarterback, but I was in the press box for the 2001, 2003, and 2007 seasons and most of my fellow analysts were calling the same plays back then. I don’t recall anyone saying SharePoint wasn’t going to go anywhere, or that IBM would stomp it out, or that they shouldn’t make the product appropriate for business-to-consumer (B2C) deployments. All these things should not have been a surprise and absent from SharePoint planning.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m pretty happy with what I’ve seen of SharePoint so far. And it’s grown even faster than I personally thought it would. But I don’t look back at the winding path with nostalgia either. If I’m teary eyed thinking of what it took to get here, it’s not necessarily for the same reasons as Steve Ballmer and Tom Rizzo.
SharePoint Conference: Keynote Applause Lines
October 19, 2009 at 4:01 pm | In Microsoft SharePoint, collaboration | Leave a CommentI have mixed feelings about applause lines at vendor conferences. These occur when a new feature is announced or demoed and the audience breaks into applause, causing the executive on stage to beam triumphantly.
On the positive side, the applause means “I’m happy, good job”. It shows the vendor has been listening to its customers and responded. That beaming is deserved.
On the cynical side, the applause also means “It’s about time.” The applause lines at this type of conference represent areas of frustration that have been removed.
Wouldn’t it be great if there aren’t such major areas of frustration that their removal causes relief? Is that too idealistic? I don’t think so. In each case, scores of users could have told the vendor the barriers or limitations that were removed should have been addressed in the last release. For example, in Arpan Shah’s session he talked about how the new business data catalog (now business connectivity services) now allows writing data back as well as just reading it (as in BDC). He worded this as “we heard you when you said you like reading, but writing is better”. C’mon, you couldn’t guess people would want to update business data once they see it displayed? It shouldn’t have taken too many user interviews and improvement requests to figure out people would want that.
One of the contributing factors to applause lines is the way that SharePoint releases are tied to Office releases: on a glacial 4 year cycle. In fact, this was a great question that an audience member raised for Steve Ballmer during the Q&A. Steve’s answer, for the record, is that just because deployment is faster doesn’t mean software can be written faster and they’ll continue to release apps on top of the platform quickly. Hmmm … can’t respond in less than four years? As I’ve said before, Office is an anchor and Microsoft should consider breaking SharePoint away from it since this forces releases to be too slow to respond to the market.
Here are the applause lines from the keynote morning:
- Standards support: REST, Atom, JSON. Clearly the fact that SharePoint releases are tied to the Office schedule caused Microsoft to respond more slowly to the rise of these standards than it would have as an independent product.
- Visual web parts: Seems pretty obvious to anyone used to Visual Basic that one should be able to click and drag to create basic controls on a page without coding.
- Limits have been raised to allow 1 million+ items in a list/folder, 10 million in a library, and 100s of millions by syncing libraries.
By the way, one item that was described and demoed, but didn’t get applause during the provided pause was taxonomy and folksonomy. That’s too bad, because it should have gotten applause. Unfortunately, I think the reason is that organizations aren’t doing enough of this today, so it’s not relieving any frustration.
Surprisingly, the social software improvements didn’t get applause either, even though it was an area of great frustration to those who really know blogs and wikis. But I guess there aren’t enough of them to fill a keynote hall with applause. Kudos to Microsoft for improving them before they become a tremendous applause line in SP2013.
Once we’ve had a chance to play with SP2010 and see what’s in it, let’s see if we can figure out what the applause lines will be 4 years from now.
SharePoint Conference Presentation: Governance, Politics, and Diplomacy with SharePoint
October 17, 2009 at 7:55 pm | In Governance, Microsoft SharePoint | Leave a CommentI’m packing my bags and heading for Vegas for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference. If you are going, make sure to see my presentation on governance. I’ll be standing up in front of 400 people, the majority of whom are “IT Professionals”, and telling them that the IT Pro role isn’t the right one to be writing a statement of governance! Remember that scene from the Blues Brothers that starts with the band wondering why there is chicken wire in front of the stage? That’ll be me.
Note: I say the IT Pro role, not any one individual person. Someone who is an IT Pro, but wants to step outside that role because of the challenge or an interest in management would certainly be appropriate.
Hope to see you there!
Governance, Politics, and Diplomacy with SharePoint: Success Factors Beyond Technology
10/21/2009 10:30 AM (Room: Lagoon L)
Few concepts have generated as much interest to SharePoint implementers as governance. Unfortunately, few concepts have been as misused as well. Governance has been viewed as a project, a document, a synonym for “maintenance,” an admin manual, or a magic-bullet solution for SharePoint success. But governance is none of those things. Craig Roth will describe his frequently cited definition of SharePoint governance including which problems it addresses – and which it does not. Mr. Roth will also walk through an outline for creating your own SharePoint Statement of Governance and describe the skills necessary to create it.
Oracle World Thomas Kurian Keynote
October 13, 2009 at 9:13 pm | In Oracle | Leave a CommentIntegration is good. But you can’t really demo it. Thomas’s keynote was a runthrough of the wonders of vertical integration, from UI down through applications, database, and (for the database appliance) even hardware. When all your systems can work together and speak to each other, wonderful things can happen.
The problem is that integration is not a yes/no question, but a matter of difficulty. A systems integrator could also show how a dozen different systems can produce miracles when integrated properly. Of course, it would cost a lot more to do it that way. But short of showing the check in the demo, that part doesn’t come across.
There are also two issues that have always prevented integration nirvana. One is that few organizations start from scratch, so you need to integrate with another vendor’s products at some point. Second is that mitigating vendor risk is often accomplished by spreading one’s IT eggs across many baskets.
Oracle WebLogic Portal Keynote
October 12, 2009 at 7:19 pm | In Oracle, portals | Leave a CommentI was interested to hear the messaging to the audiences of the “other” portals that Oracle still sells, even though WebCenter is the annointed portal. This was an issue that bookeneded the presentation. At the beginning, there was a slide for people entering the room clarifying “This presentation is about WebLogic Portal. Not the product Oracle calls “Oracle Portal” …”. At the end Josh addressed the relationship to WebCenter. The official answer is that WebCenter can add in collaboration and portlets. That doesn’t ring true to me as it’s not like BEA didn’t build that into their product and nothing has been removed. When an audience member asked which portal to use in his case (“a customer-facing portal”). The answer was “it depends … WebCenter is an umbrella term … leverage common services … not one or the other”.
Josh Lannin described how the new version will have better drag and drop and better organization of the portlet library. Simplification of the huge API set using controls (started in 8.1) and REST (10.2). Will now REST-enable the user profiles. Nice, but not earth shattering. There will be CMIS support to get at content, which is more RESTful and subscribeable.
On the development front there will be a new “Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse”. It’s a set of free plugins for Eclipse. He pushed the JSR286 standard since it works well with new UI frameworks like JSF, struts, webflow. The IDE will have good JSR286 functionality including what he called “upgrade from jsr 168″. Neat – I haven’t heard about that before. And needed since it’s not like developers are creating jsr 286 portlets right now. They’ll add more of the WSRP 2.0 optional specs too, like coordination, resource serving, and consumer control over navigation.
There will also be increased “Oracle-ization” (my spell checker is flagging that word). Cute way of describing the security and internationalization standards that are required of their products.
Oracle WebCenter Keynote
October 12, 2009 at 7:13 pm | In Enterprise 2.0, Oracle | Leave a CommentNothing new here since my posting after the Oracle analyst event in June. There is a new set of product codenames (Sunshine for WebLogic portal, Neo for ALUI, RoadRunner for WebCenter). Oracle Portal doesn’t seem to have a cute name yet, and they couldn’t talk about Sun.
I like how Oracle continues to address SharePoint – the gorilla in the collaboration room – and how they recognize the need for integration. As far as I can tell, the integration is still mostly through the WSRP producer though. They also recognize this isn’t an “open” market – there are a significant number of existing implementations, so “protect and leverage” is what they are aiming at. Good to hear.
Again, Oracle blurs “Enterprise 2.0 and Portals” (as it subtitled the strategy slides). Portals can surface information from social software, but “and” is not the right way to approach it. Social software sites need their own environments that enable them to be easily integrated in context with other applications. Not that it can’t be used that way, but the messaging is that these two things are one combined entity.
Oracle World Keynote
October 12, 2009 at 7:09 pm | In Oracle | Leave a CommentHello from San Francisco, where I’m attending the first few days of Oracle World ‘09. I got a good briefing in June (blogged here), and didn’t hear much new, so my postings will be more commentary than lists of features.
Today’s kick-off keynote was content rich. I mean it – no Olympic rhythmic gymnasts, no loud band, no dancing bears as it common at these big conferences. There was a factual discussion of what has been released by Oracle in the past year. Still, after a difficult day getting to San Francisco, some dancing bears would have helped wake me up. There may have been more fanfare last night for Larry Ellison, but I got in too late for that one.
The keynote’s theme was “Art of the Possible”. That phrase is a trimmed version of Otto Von Bismark’s line “Politics is the art of the possible.” The presentation wasn’t about politics at all, but ironically they hit on a recurring theme in the portal, collaboration, and social software coverage we do. Politics – cooperation across organizational boundaries, incentive systems, ownership – is what makes collaboration or social networking possible, or impossible. Most of the difficulties with setting up governance around intranets or portals is politics and diplomacy. Once the right political environment is in place, the technology can thrive. Despite the title, that wasn’t what Charles Phillips and Safra Catz were talking about. The coolest new thing they talked about was the Sun Oracle Database Machine, an attempt to demonstrate synergy with Sun and Oracle by combining hardware and software. Time will tell if such an appliance is in high demand from organizations that have already figured out how to work with separate hardware and databases.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
