Solution for Broken IT: Fix It
November 23, 2009 at 4:36 pm | In Governance, Microsoft SharePoint | Leave a 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 | Leave a 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.
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.
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