The SharePoint Phenom
Exploring the Services Platform of the Century
JB Holston: How many enterprise applications work out of the box exactly the way you like them? None. SharePoint does a lot of things; it doesn’t do any of them as well as the best-of-breed specialized vendors, such as BI, Web content management, ECM or social. But it has this huge ecosystem. Microsoft will say that SharePoint itself is about a $1.7 billion business, but there’s $6 billion to $8 billion of ISV/system integrator revenue on top of that. And that’s not a bad thing. It means that customers don’t have to devote 40 people to enhancing SharePoint; they can just go to the support industry for that. The ecosystem is perceived to have value because of that.
Dan Holme: Actually, quite atypically for Microsoft, they have made something that is pretty easy to use right out of the box. A user can sit down in front of a SharePoint site and start figuring out what to do. That, along with other factors, has made user adoption a reality. Unlike with many of its competitors, which have come and gone. With many “enterprise” applications, you could put the infrastructure and policies in place, but users wouldn’t use them. They didn’t interface with the tools they were familiar with; they didn’t behave in the way they understood, so people just didn’t use them. But with SharePoint, users get it.
Andy: If SharePoint is so great, why do you need so much tinkering from the “ecosystem?”
Dan Holme: If QuickBooks is so great, why are there accountants? Keep in mind, SharePoint is a platform. It has features, and solves 80% of what the market is looking for. But when you get to that very-specific-to-your-business edge you’re looking for, there’s going to be a third party in there.
Making SharePoint Work
Andy: So I get it. SharePoint is a Swiss Army knife, filled with potential to do a lot of things, but not specifically designed to do a single thing. What advice do you give people who are considering a deployment?
Dan Holme: I keep my clients focused on the business problem, not the technology. This is a journey. There will be change. You need a governance plan in place that is set up to be iterative. If you have that road map, you’re going to be successful. If you dive in and say, “we’re going to boil the ocean with SharePoint this year,” well... good luck with that.
The problem isn’t SharePoint. It’s how well managed and governed your business is. If you don’t have a well-managed business, SharePoint will be a magnifying glass on your problems. But if you have a well-governed organization, you can get great value from SharePoint.
Find out what applies to the individual and assess their pain points, because SharePoint is so many things to so many people. It doesn’t help to just make a laundry list of capabilities. You need to address the individual and ask questions: “What isn’t working?” “When you work with someone on a document, are you emailing it back and forth, and can’t keep track of what’s what?” “Do you have a stack of forms that need to be entered manually into a system?” “Are you working with arcane systems written before Y2K that you’re still trying to drag data out of?” SharePoint is a wide and horizontal platform that solves many narrow and vertical business problems. It’s those specific points of pain you need to focus on.
Chris Geier: Dan made a great point. SharePoint will uncover problems that weren’t visible before. Microsoft itself has hundred of thousands of SharePoint sites internally. In the beginning, they went nuts with the idea of website self-creation—all you had to do was click a button and, boom, you had a site. That’s a difficult thing to control, which is why planning and information architecture are so crucial to a successful adoption. It’s OK to have dynamically created sites that ebb and flow, but the information architecture has to be in place first to support how the business operates. Sites can come and go, but the core structure has to be in place so people know where to go and why.
Paul Doscher: As this trend continues and more junk gets dumped into SharePoint—whether it’s structured data or casual content like tweets—the need to improve usability and findability behind the scenes, and federating the access to all those SharePoint instances, becomes a crucial challenge.
JB Holston: And the “information silo” situation is only getting worse with social. People are using SharePoint as their primary knowledge repository. People are even using Twitter that way—they tweet a link and assume that’s a perpetual archive of knowledge in their universe. So suddenly there’s all this interactive content that also needs to be search-accessible all the way to the device. This makes search and filtering and intelligence THE big issue going forward.
Andy: All this talk of “governance” and “information architecture” begs the question: Who needs to be in charge? SharePoint, as we’ve learned, is the tool of the everyman—anybody can launch a SharePoint site and create a SharePoint “farm” of information. But rarely does the individual consider the greater good.
Dan Holme: This is a tipping point for IT. They cannot be mere technicians anymore. They have be able to do business analysis. In another few years, the only IT pros left will be working for Google and Microsoft hosting their cloud servers. Anyone technical who’s still in an organization will have to be a business analyst. And organizations are doing something about it, too, by putting IT people into that role; they recognize that they have to have a smarter interface between business and technology.
What’s really new about SharePoint is that it is a service. We haven’t seen something like that in IT other than email. With Office, users created their own applications. Now, with SharePoint, IT is creating business applications.
Paul Doscher: It’s a CIO-level sale. No question.
Andy: Since you mentioned “selling,” let’s talk about that. What do you think Microsoft talks about behind closed doors while they’re developing their go-to-market strategy?
Paul Doscher: Typically for Microsoft, they view SharePoint as a departmental sale, whereas the other content management systems are enterprise sales... when they go after the CIO, they do it on a grand scale. With SharePoint, Microsoft can say, “For just a little more on your customer access license, you can get this great platform that works with all your other Office products.” Now, there are some IT pros who are starting to resent the “all-in” mentality from Microsoft. One guy said, “I only use 10% of my brain; I use less than that from my Office suite.” Microsoft—to their detriment—continues to try to lock organizations into a complete “MS suite,” including the operating system. If companies prefer open source, it’s really hard to make it work together with the existing Microsoft stuff. As long as Microsoft pursues an end-to-end suite approach, it will cause polarity in many organizations, and make them decide between MS suite or best-of-breed. I don’t think ultimately that is the smartest thing they should do.