What's your strategy for using SharePoint?
Recently I read two articles in Computing which highlight the challenges which Executives face in understanding how to use SharePoint technologies to deliver business value.
The first article claims that UK business are struggling with innovation. Accenture estimate that 58% of UK business Executives feel that innovation is essential to their company’s long term success.
“Innovation should not be confined to the research and development function, or even just in the marketing function, in high performing businesses it permeates the culture, metrics and processes of the whole company.”
Typically companies associate innovation with the desire to increase market share. Here is the link,
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/news/2213593/uk-business-struggles
The second article claims that social software has still not shown its business benefits. Half of global CIO’s plan to invest in Web 2.0 technologies for the first time in 2008, according to Gartner but, the article claims, many firms lack understanding of how social collaboration tools can be used to create business benefit. Here’s the link;
http://www.computing.co.uk/computing/analysis/2212380/head-spinning-world-web-3895286
Although you don’t hear it mentioned too often SharePoint is a Knowledge Management tool. What is SharePoint? It is Microsoft’s Information Worker platform. It’s a highly scalable and extensible platform for creating a wide variety of different solutions for Information Workers.
There are two types of knowledge. Explicit knowledge which can be written down or codified in some way; this could be in the form of reports, presentations, spreadsheets, process maps, or any other type of document or artefact. Implicit knowledge is that which is based on experience, it cannot be written down or recorded.
Researchers at the Harvard Business School published an article in 1999 which indentified two basic strategies for managing knowledge (http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/0500.html).
A Codification strategy addresses the management of Explicit knowledge. This type of strategy focuses on putting in place processes, policies and technology to capture, store, manage and retrieve documents which contain knowledge vital to an organisation. A Personalisation strategy addresses the management of Implicit knowledge. This type of strategy focuses on putting in place processes, policies and technologies which bring people together, and facilitate the sharing of ideas, and information. Although an organisation may use elements of both strategies the key to success is to identify the one which is best suited to the business model and high level strategic objectives and to focus on this.
For example an organisation which repeatedly solves the same problem, or delivers the same type of solution or service again and again for different clients will probably want to focus on standardisation, increasing efficiency and effectiveness within core business processes and lowering costs. In this case a Codification, or Person-to-Document strategy will probably be most appropriate. Conversely am organisation which offers a highly bespoke service to clients, focusing on quality not volume business will probably be focused innovation, and creativity rather than costs. Here a Personalisation strategy will probably be most appropriate.
SharePoint provides the tools to support both of these types of strategy. For a Codification strategy we have Enterprise Content Management, Workflow, Excel Services, and Document Search. For a Personalisation strategy we have MySite and the Social Networking web parts, People Search, Collaboration, and the Community kit.
Returning then to the two articles in Computing that prompted this post; The value of Social networking and Web 2.0 technologies is that they support Personalisation knowledge management strategies which are key to successful processes on innovation. For organisations that do not value or focus on innovation these technologies may not deliver significant benefits, these organisations may benefit more from those tools that support a Codification strategy.
SJ