Too many business users today view SharePoint as a place; another link to keep up with among the overflow of internal portals, applications, tools, wikis, and other supposedly useful repositories your organization throws at them and expects them to keep up with.
With the growth of SharePoint through the 2007 (MOSS) release and into the latest 2010 version, more and more enlightened companies are seeing the potential in SharePoint as an application and productivity platform. And while the transition can be painful politically, and the change management dreadfully slow, the consolidation of pet point solutions onto the SharePoint platform is proving a welcome reduction in enterprise server clutter.
But how do you manage the human transition from old-school process silos, isolated legacy applications, innovation inertia, and so much email, to a more streamlined environment leveraging the power of SharePoint?
You need smart planning and governance, surely. Of course you want to prioritize projects that will offer the most bang for the most users (if not the most “visible” users). Often this strategy takes the form of your corporate intranet. “Let’s move our exiting portal onto SharePoint,” say the powers. “We’ll rebuild the organizational chart there, give every team a home page, add some company news and a yellow pages, and voila.”
This top-down approach can look very attractive through a telescope. Through a microscope, though, not so much.
While you’re implementing your intranet (check), designing the portal layers (check), adding your company directory (check), building out team sites (check), and pivoting to your largest/loudest internal clients for custom development (check, check, check), where does that leave the average worker?
With more links to keep up with, that’s where. Legacy applications, manual processes, paper forms, email attachment ping-pong, and a new link to the fancy new intranet.
Maybe your plan is to stabilize the portal, put out the major fires, then swoop back in with your SharePoint analysts and your trainers, and enlighten your workers with the keys to improved collaboration. “You know that new intranet we rolled out a ways back? Well look what else it can do…”
Through your telescope you’ll see a cluster of work groups longing to be rescued from their medieval ways, waiting for that leader with vision and a great tool to lift them oily and wet from the mire.
Check your microscope, though, and I bet you’ll find workers jaded by promises, still smarting from failed initiatives of the past, and resistant to change of any kind. A few might be adopting tools of their own that may or may not be on your roadmap. All are overworked, underappreciated, and focused on getting by with what they have.
On the bright side, SharePoint is a large pond getting larger. As its capabilities grow into more and more areas, more and more expertise from different parts of your organization can play a part in its success.
Where there are pockets of adoption and grassroots innovation in the enterprise, where there is growth propagated by those outside the official roadmap, and where the industrious have taken it upon themselves to improve their lot, recognition and encouragement must follow. These groups are the ones bridging the gap between top-down aesthetics and bottom-up results. These are the integrators.