This past week I had the honor of co-presenting at SHARE, the “SharePoint Conference for Business Users”, with one of my most distinguished clients, Andy Farella from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. While our own presentation was focused on how CHOP found success by planning and rolling out social collaboration tools that were, at the time, anything but “out of the box” (more on that in an upcoming webinar), I discovered that one of SHARE’s more common threads was an emphasis on building value with SharePoint without heavy customization.
Whether it was intranet managers using basic workflows, custom lists and publishing pages from the 2010 release or the consistent buzz about how Yammer adds a social layer to the entire Microsoft productivity suite (and I’ve more on that in an upcoming blog), you couldn’t escape that theme in Atlanta. SharePoint can do just about anything with a little customization—but it can do a pretty big chunk of that anyway with nothing more than solid planning and configuration.
At this point in SharePoint’s maturity, I’d think this wouldn’t be a revelation anymore, but it’s surprising just how wrong I’d be if I made a statement to that effect. Turns out, plenty of people on the business side of the house still don’t understand what SharePoint can do for them. Numerous conversations with speakers in corporate, “consumer” roles proved this to me rather quickly. These people were almost universally in agreement on one thing: their business users didn’t always understand just how much this platform can help them.
The same questions we heard years ago about “proving ROI” for simple collaboration tools—the ones everyone takes for granted now like email, document library services, and instant messaging—are still being asked. The only difference is that today, those questions are asked about social features like microblogs, communities, and social search.
To me, this theme really proves the value of having strong partners. Whether it’s standout supplemental software like that produced by NewsGator, AvePoint, K2 and others, and/or an experienced systems integrator who understands the strategic side of succeeding with efforts like intranets, extranets, portals, social business and content management, if you want SharePoint to work for you out of the box, you can gain pretty good value for your dollar by bringing the experts in for some good advice.
Shameless Plug… er, Shakespearean Dramatic Aside, I mean: If I can indulge in a bit of self-promotion on behalf of my team, this is what makes Perficient in particular a special case. These days, social business gets all the buzz, and everyone claims to be doing it. As one of those strategic partners who understands the business case and change management as well as we understand the technical side, we’ve been helping our clients “get social” for several years already. This is amply evidenced by social software leader NewsGator naming us their Partner of the Year for both 2011 and 2012—an award earned not just for technical brilliance in implementation but for the planning, design and execution that goes into getting our customers going on that software.
A successful social experience is about so much more than just “being viral” and letting people connect helter-skelter with one another (although there’s something to be said for that). Through actual projects with real-life clients like CHOP, we know it takes good governance, appetite and aptitude, an energized user base and—if you lack any of these things—a strong emphasis on organizational change management to grow them. We know this and we’ve done it, over and over again.
It was fun to spend time around a few hundred people who understood these things. I’m excited to think they’re all going back to their own companies, charged up and ready to use SharePoint in new and intriguing ways that bring demonstrable value. Maybe you can’t tie a quantifiable ROI to it, but you never really could before either. What you can tie back to it is happier people, better production, an easier time connecting users to information and documents and especially other users, employee retention, knowledge capture, and a dozen other things that really do matter.
Thanks for SHAREing, everyone. I hope to see you all again soon.
