- Posted by karthik on October 9, 2009
In meetings with current and potential clients, we always hear this comment at the highest levels of IT management. Almost always, the context is around a business need or pain that can be managed using a tool like SharePoint (in their own words) but that's where the thought stops, for whatever reason.
When it happens once, its an anamoly; When it happens twice, it could be a coincidence; but when its more that that, it is either reality or a perception of it! So it got me thinking and that is a scary thing 
In the process of trying to put context around it and address the issue of perception or a lack thereof, I have come up with some thoughts. These thoughts are not grounded in facts or stats, so bear with me.
At work, I am often approached by my counterparts in the Business Development side of things who start the conversation with - "We have this organization that is interested in SharePoint....."; My usual response is "What do they do?" followed by "Why are they interested in Sharepoint?"
At some point, it starts to become clear that, like most medium to big sized orgs, there has been an evolution of "organized chaos" within the enterprise that has now resulted in a million legacy technology applications doing "custom business" things, with a billion artifacts (in the form of documents/emails/other types of unstructured content) being stored across the entire IT ecosystem. Usually when this system reaches a stage bordering business pain is when organizations start thinking about strategy as it relates to "managing the chaos".
As an example, most organizations traditionally do not care about how much file content is being stored in hardware based file storage systems because stora
ge cost has never been an issue. So it is okay to have IT create a file share for the Marketing department that ends up using the share as a document/image repository for all of their big file needs. However, when the repository scales out to gigabytes of content with no structure or hierachy, then it is IT that ends up having to troubleshoot issues and maintain those systems. Since IT has no clue what is inside that repository, they do not have an efficient or timely way to support and manage the expectations of end users, whose biggest need right now is to find the "right file/s" and they can't do that because the thing is just too unwieldy!
This has a direct impact on productivity, efficiency, frustration with work tasks, frustration with IT and so on and so forth...Now, you may think this is not applicable to your organization because you have this built-in auto-magic sense system that just works. Reality is, the way you work within that system is probably not the same way that your colleague does or for that matter anyone else. And guess what, that is typical; Unless and until there is STRUCTURE around what you do and the same rules apply to everyone within that system no matter how you do it, you cannot have an expectation that your need is being met in a way that matches your requirement.
This is where SharePoint comes in. It forces you to adopt a "methodology/framework/process/tool" that brings that "order to your chaos". Notice that I am intentionally ambiguous about whether it is a "methodology/framework/process/tool" because SharePoint can be all of that; Or just some of that; or just one of that. As (my newly adopted favorite) phrase goes, "It depends!"
Now, what does all this have to do with blog title, you ask? If you have made it this far, then the answer is...........there is not one!
In the next post, I will pen down some thoughts on how to tackle a SharePoint conversation that seems to lead towards this context and the information you can use to answer this question.