Making the Most of SharePoint

One of the challenges that organizations face with SharePoint is that they tend to put a lot of information into SharePoint, yet don't organize their repositories well, and then complain that they can't find the information.

They say, "We have so many SharePoint repositories and workspaces that we just can't find anything."

And the challenge is that many times they're using SharePoint for the wrong purpose. If you're using it as a collaborative workspace, that means that lots and lots of people will be creating these applications, and collaborating and creating knowledge, but not necessarily putting that knowledge into a format that will be easily reused in the organization.

I'll give you an example. Let's imagine you and I were working in a room and we had some colleagues in there and we were sharing notes and we had papers out and flip charts and Post-It notes and so on. Someone wouldn't come into that room from another part of the organization and say, "Hey, where's that research report?" Or, "Where are those policy documents?" We are working in a workspace. That's a collaborative workspace. It's a workroom. We're not working; we're not a repository to share across the organization.

Now, after we finish our work and after we produce our report, we can then take it out and put it on a shelf where other people can find it. That is a repository for knowledge reuse. So, the collaborative workspaces are not necessarily meant for knowledge reuse. The repositories are meant for knowledge reuse.

The problem organizations have is they're using SharePoint for the wrong purposes. They have too many workspaces. They're not well-managed. They're not well-organized. They're not governed. And obviously that stuff is going to get out of control.

The answer to this is to understand the purpose of these workspaces, to manage them appropriately, to govern them appropriately. And then also to take content and promote that content to repository for reuse.

It's understanding the content life cycle. It's understanding that content that can be created in a very chaotic environment that requires people coming together, working; solving problems. But then once it's finished, we don't care about all the work papers. Those can stay in the workspace. Once it's finished, we take it, we put it on the shelf, so to speak, put it in another SharePoint repository that's designed for reuse.

So one of the things that we do when we help organizations with this is we help them design SharePoint for the right purpose. And we help them understand the content life cycle and the value of different types of content so that it can be created in the right place and then promoted to a reusable content object or a knowledge object and then accessed in the right place.