Is SharePoint 2010 the "One"?

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

Level of effort versus value of content - All too often, projects are not run with enough resources or with the correct methodologies.  This is not necessarily a bad thing.  There are times when we can put up an application and allow users to do their best to figure it out.  However, with high value content and complex usage, this approach is rarely successful.    In SharePoint projects, particular attention needs to be paid to content types and the lifecycles of high value content.

Search Approach - Organizations too often rely on full-text search alone, and are increasingly disillusioned by the results.   Most IT shops don’t have strategies in place for either making full text search work well; or for augmenting full text search with other appropriate strategies.

Information Architecture - Organizations typically under-estimate the importance of re-thinking information architecture (IA) before migrating.  Information Architecture defines content types, taxonomies, metadata, workflow, navigational structures and search mechanisms to create a user experience that is intuitive and satisfying.    Good user experience depends on due diligence in IA design.

Content Cleanup and Migration - Another impediment to a successful SharePoint migration is failure to remove ROT (redundant, out-dated, trivial content) in the old system.  Cleaning up content is as, or more, important than organizing it.  It’s easier to throw out the junk in your attic than to put it in neat containers from The Container Store – especially if it’s junk.  Many organizations find when they clean up their content the good stuff rises to the top and they can remove as much as 40% of it.    

Ongoing Governance - the reason things get mucked up is that roles, responsibilities and procedures are not in place to ensure that  content is effectively managed and maintained in a usable state.  Although many organizations have a working governance model for data management, they don’t see the urgency of applying it to unstructured content.   SharePoint is notorious for getting out of hand even when technical governance is in place.  This is because business involvement is necessary to ensure value to users.

All of these issues need to be considered before, during and after your SharePoint deployment. We’ll be running one of our highly regarded Jumpstart conference call series on SharePoint planning, migration and deployment.  Register for the series now.  Feel free to pass on to your colleagues and be sure you have your management attend.  We’ll arm you with data, best practices and case examples so that you can be sure your SharePoint program is a great success.