Round Table Business Forum

1. Round Table Business Forum Presenter : Veronique Palmer 20 May 2009

2. Background I was tasked to rollout SharePoint in my organisation. Having never heard of SharePoint before then, I had plenty of challenges getting the job done. It’s been extremely frustrating and I’ve struggled to find the right resources to make it easier. Being invited to join the Information Worker team provided me with a great support system, but found it very technical. There was not much business user presence or focus. We decided to try and expand the focus of the user group to include more business users. This Knowledge Cafe was the first of its nature at IW to attract that demographic. The following are the issues raised by the participants, they are placed in order of the number of times they were mentioned. I also included input from business users that was emailed to me as they could not attend the meeting. One things is clear, training is certainly a very big issue.

3. What are your top 3 business challenges? • Training – rollout training and ongoing training. Technical, developer, designer and business user training requirements all • different, need end user specific. Training too generic. (13) • Adoption – user buy-in, management buy-in, getting users to start using SharePoint, getting users to take ownership. (10) • Relevance – users get intimidated by how much SharePoint can do, need to decide who needs to know what. SharePoint • too complex. (8) • Knowledge Management and Governance policies. (7) • Disconnect between IT and business needs. (5) • Change Management. (5) • Finding skills and having skilled resources internally. (4) • Getting management buy-in. (4) • Lack of architecture, strategy and proper planning. (4) • Lack of access to business problems to map to SharePoint, mapping SharePoint to business problems, not knowing what • business problems to solve. (4) • Employees don’t know what SharePoint can do. (3) • Awareness. (3) • Where to start. (3) • Lack of ongoing support, being told to Google it doesn’t cut it. Support and administration of team sites. (2) • Accurately defining and understanding the business problem. (2) • Records Management and Content Management philosophies. (2) • Companies implement SharePoint without assessing the business needs. • Understanding the product. • Information overload when searching for answers on the Internet. • Project Management.

4. Business challenges continued • Lack of understanding of ECM systems. • Document versioning. • Proving the value add. • Finding best practices. • Building a strategy from software and service components. • Users can abuse the functionality for the wrong purpose, SharePoint is powerful and IT can’t control it. • How to come up with fresh ideas to keep your content alive and attracting users to it. • Content management of the intranet. • Managing the generation gap – how different each generation is when trying to teach them SharePoint and getting their buy in. • Mindset change from paper based systems, emails and file servers. The inbox / outbox mentality - people used to working with • paper and equate having an empty outbox as deliverables met, they cannot make the transition to a virtual environment. • Knowledge is power mentality - people unwilling to share information; discussion forums don't work and there is a lack of • communication. • Users lose faith in the product because they are self taught, when things go wrong they just give up. • Time - no time to do the work required, nor time to share the knowledge. • Site design becomes a challenge whether done by individuals or groups - everybody has heir own ideas as to how things • should be. • Perception that SharePoint creates extra work and duplications. • Not everyone in the team is aware of what SharePoint is and all the functionality available. Perception is that SharePoint just • replaces the current repositories - it can do much more than that. • Learning curve and take on is much longer than expected, need to manage expectations better. Users only want to use the • basics at first - don't oversell. • Super users vs beginners - need to remember that it is not easy to get going on the product.

5. What are your top 3 technical challenges? • Migrating data from older version of SharePoint, and from files servers. (8) • Integration with EPM, Remedy (task requests), SQL for web applications, etc. (6) • SharePoint Designer – not easy for business users. (6) • Lack of skills and knowledge. (6) • Workflow – custom workflow difficult for business users. (5) • Customising themes and colours. Not knowing how to make creative sites. (4) • Users having different software on the PC’s, Office 2003 and 2007, and difficulty getting them upgraded. (4) • Bandwidth, multiple instances seen as one instance. (4) • Technical install vs business requirement. Lack of access to SSP. (3) • InfoPath. (2) • Lack of focus of what business solution is to be provided by the use of SharePoint. Translating business needs into • technical solution. (2) • Error descriptions not explanatory enough. (2) • Proper planning of the implementation. (2) • Getting users up to speed technically so users don’t break SharePoint. Technology illiterate users. (2) • Enterprise Features. (2) • Search configuration. (2) • Users don’t understand the complexity in customising a site’s look and feel. • Intranet / internet use. • Defining functionality. • Distributed architecture. • No underlying procedures and standards. • No business case. • Offline capabilities.

6. Technical challenges continued • Performance and availability. • Getting techies to follow up on the rollout. • Getting techies to understand business. • KPI’s and BI. • DMS not shared across domains / instances. • Lack of open standards. • No ‘intermediate’ design tool. • Back-end content management and replication. • Quality of service management tools. • Indexing of large documents. • Developers don’t want to work on the SharePoint platform, they would rather develop from scratch. They also • develop rather than looking at out of box features first. • Basic functionality missing. • Applying security models. Mapping AD security to MOSS security. • Bi-directional SAP / MOSS integration with BDC’s needs more visibility – where are the successful implementations. • Looking for a video compression tool to host on SharePoint. • Add section headings to surveys. • What does Expressions Web do and how to leverage on SharePoint. • How to reflect new activities on discussion forums adequately.

7. What can the Vendors do to make SharePoint implementations easier? • Provide training manuals and on time with release. More in-depth tutorials. Provide training after implementation. Need better end user • and technical training. Using blogs and wikis. Offer business training for community owners. Training manuals need to be more concise, • better categorised and step by step. Online tutorials. (19) • Provide an pre-packaged example of an ideal site and include the ‘How To’ to get to that. Have pre-packaged examples for each industry. • How to optimally structure a site as a site owner. Have more specific and complete templates targeting typical business pains. (11) • Open and proactive communication with clients, build relationships with business specialists. Floor walking. Better advisory role. (5) • Offer support for 3 months free, and then on a time and material basis. Ongoing ‘soft’ support. Need guidance as to whether the design is • going in the right direction, ad-hoc consultancy / input. (5) • Share knowledge and educate users. (3) • Provide more skills and industry specialists. Send a business specialist in first, then the technical team. (3) • Educate clients better on the capabilities, eg: Records Centres. (2) • Sell a business solution to a business problem, not SharePoint, then solve the business problem during implementation. (2) • Make SharePoint more self-documenting explaining how it’s configured and architected. (2) • Make companies aware of how different versions of software will have an impact. (2) • Need assistance with planning, information architecture, how to get value. • Communicate capabilities – have demo’s on live sites. • Provide an advisory role after implementation. • After sales service should include a user group mentality in the company. • The companies need to take more responsibility to run with the rollout. • Need an uncluttered, consistent and intuitive user interface for users for help. • Reduce and simplify jargon. Users get confused between sites, site collections, lists, web parts, etc. • Give users access to an Innovation Centre like IBM’s. • More interactiveness at partner meetings. • Pre-package a SharePoint deployment, vertical and horizontal. • Proactiveness in providing a solution. • Provide more meat on the different solutions offered, eg: pros and cons of using document libraries vs document centres. • Doing implementations the way SAP does.

8. What ‘s the most surprising thing you learnt today? I think a lot of people got a surprise today. Not everyone wrote down their closing statements, and I can’t remember all 30 comments. Feel free to send them to me and I will add them to this list. • Interesting to see how many people are experiencing the same sort of challenges. • Nice to hear from the business side and their challenges. • Business requirements are not well specified. • The variety of users and uses for SharePoint. • This is great, ie: collaborating, it should happen more. • Everyone has the same challenges. • That this forum existed at all. Would be nice to create in-house forums. • Confirmation that the biggest issue is not only the toll, but the content management strategy when • deploying. • That everyone is saying the same thing.

9. So what now? We need to give everyone time to digest all this. I’m sure everyone involved will be looking at the whole SharePoint issue differently from now on. From an Information Worker perspective, we have a team meeting next week where we will discuss what to do next and how to address some of the issues raised. We will keep you updated along the way. If there is something you would like to raise or suggest, please post it on our website. In the meantime, just remember .... YOU ARE NOT ALONE!! 