Turning SharePoint from good to great

I touched a while back on the problem with SharePoint trying to be all things to all people and in our offering to clients this has recently taken shape in a meaningful way. With 100 million (yes, 100,000,000) or more seats sold over the last some years there is no getting away that SharePoint has a powerful place in the business software landscape.

The CEO of our author partner - FlowCentric - has published a white paper on turning SharePoint from Good to Great. This harks back to my previous points that it attempts to be all things to all people and in doing so fails to be great at anything.

In reality as we see Microsoft mature its marketing message it appears to move away from the quite exact terms in 2007 of "Streamline Processes" and "Business Intelligence" to more generic terms in 2010 of "Composites" and "Insights". Reading between the lines this suggests to me an acknowledgement that all-things-to-all people is not a viable path to success. Rather it shows an acceptance that SharePoint is a framework and perhaps the plumbing that underpins an array solution sets delivering outcomes to end users.

In the area of Streamline Processes/Composites this allows for and supports the existence of specialist fit-for-purpose tools to address composite areas across the business whilst standing firmly on the foundations that SharePoint brings in the server layer.

So how do we turn it from good to great? By bringing worthwhile and tangible benefits to the key stakeholders - more control for the IT department, better and more visible process outcomes for the business, less confusion for end users.

Get a copy of the whitepaper "FlowCentric turns SharePoint from Good to Great" here.

Operating in a constrained resources environment

With employment hovering around 4% in Australia these days the brutal reality is that the people available for work quite frankly can't or won't. Many businesses, my employer included, are scrambling to find quality people to fill the vacant positions throughout the company.


This brings two interesting issues to the fore:

- you need to be efficient and effective in what you do

- you need smart tools and systems for people to work with


Why?


Efficiency and effectiveness enables your people to do more with less or the same. It allows people to process the 80% straight through activities with the least amount of perturbation and confusion. It frees time for the smart and skilled people to focus on the issues of importance, the 20% exceptions that really need the rigour and focus of the human touch.


Smart tools and systems encourage people to see the value that is placed in their own skills and experience. If you seduce new hires into the business and then present them with fractured and flawed processes that demand they spend an unreasonable amount of time and effort in administration they may well decide to look around again for somewhere that respects them more.


So what can we do as businesses to become better employers of choice then the next guy? Well my employer takes part in the Hewitt Best Employer initiative which measures and reports on the work force engagement across a wide range of focus areas - this is a great initiative and well respected within the business.


At an operational level over the last few years we have implemented a number of improved business management systems including time sheeting and CRM. We have also automated a wide range of internal finance and HR processes within FlowCentric that have radically improved the content gathering, verification and delegated approval activities and unbelievably reduced the time lag. These processes including adding and changing financial customer and supplier records, personal expense claims amongst others. This is an endless journey, there are always new processes to automate and improvements to make to the existing ones.


Interestingly the change management was not as challenging as we had thought it would be. The take up of these improvements and the employee survey feedback has been extremely positive. The web and email environment for the automated processes reduce to virtually zero the amount of face-to-face training required. The speed of process initiation and execution has been pretty much universally welcomed. Indeed now the level of expectation has risen to a point where what was "special" has become just "business as usual".


We are proud of the process improvement solutions we bring to market, we use them ourselves, they work well and deliver genuine and measurable benefits. Our people are more efficient in their jobs and respected in their workplace. We know we have to operate in a constrained resources environment for the foreseeable future and we continue to focus on improving.


Try it out for ourselves - we could deliver a measurable benefit in a key process in your business within 30 days - not must risk or cost in that.

A brave new SOA world?

Yes, it has been a while, but I have been busy and preoccupied. Following my last post on SOA I decided that I needed a good hard look at the whole SOA story - there seems to be so much noise and marketing about it that I feel my small and addled brain has missed out on the important points that make it oh-so-exciting.

To that end I have attended a couple of seminar presentations on the topic from a case study and a major vendor point of view - my life is not as exciting as it sounds! But hey, the free breakfasts were good.

OK, I think I get it a bit more now - however I think many of the major SOA "pushers" are heavily focusing on the techie feature-function issues and haven't got such a strong grasp around the tangible business benefits yet - or if they have they are failing to articulate them. Sitting in a presentation where a vendor product executive was extolling the virtues of their forthcoming (over some years) SOA it was hard not to notice the air of disinterest across the roomful of financial and business attendees.

Here is a great business benefit courtesy of PepsiCo - it costs between US$20k and US$120k per annum to support an application interface. So if you, like they, have upwards of 1200 (!) of the suckers across the enterprise then your IT application support and maintenance budget is a serious cost to the business. A sensible goal would be to collapse and consolidate the application landscape into a core set of common tools and a select set of specialised components. If you can then build a process centric layer over an SOA (or Enterprise Bus) that allows you to standardise a range of those user interfaces and remove them from the constraints of dealing with the original application suite then you are on the P&L bus to saving tangible costs.

So in an environment like this where is an SOA layer going to come from? Is it sensible to expect that capability and commitment to openness to exist end-to-end across the business application portfolio you use? Probably not. I think there will be components of ready made exposure from core application suites and these will need to be extended and enhanced through additional bespoke development in line with the business processes.

This is where I think the reality clashes with the dream - as you build ever increasing layers of specific complexity on top of a generic core application SOA how much threat do you bring to the solution when fundamentals changes are made to the foundation SOA? Further to what extent have you got the capability to actually achieve the full objective if so much of the underlying process logic is buried in a framework you are completely reliant on and yet have absolutely no control over?

Even today we are all exposed to the vagaries of the existing APIs over commercial applications. Only last week our team had to devise a workaround to overcome a potential weakness in an API to achieve an appropriate level of audit control for a client's SOX compliance requirement. It probably wasn't a weakness in the API when the purposes for the process were originally foreseen however times have changed and compliance demands have increased. In fairness to the application author the latest version of the API resolves the issue however upgrading wasn't a viable option for the client.

So in our brave new Utopian SOA world how will we handle demands for change? I am guessing in exactly the same way we do today - with bespoke developed workarounds and customisations that add support and maintenance cost to the delivery of IT systems into the business. Sound familiar?

I think the SOA story as pushed by application vendors is a defensive move on their part to protect themselves from client attrition through application malaise, attrition or retirement. If you are serious about an SOA in your business then you may have to bite the bullet to develop the whole end-to-end capability for your self. Interestingly that is pretty much what Pepsico seems to have done in conjunction with a BPMS.