Hi all

Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a little differently to govern SharePoint strategy and deployment. You will learn a bunch of new skills, techniques and perspectives. Best of all, the skills learnt are applicable for many other types of complex projects.

The class flyer is here: http://www.sevensigma.com.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/02/SPIA.pdf

The registration site is here: http://spiavancouver.eventbrite.com/

In terms of course coverage and content it is worth noting the research performed by the Eventful group (who run the Share conferences). According to them, the hot topic areas for SharePoint are governance, user adoption, change management, information architecture and user empowerment. These sort of topics are the sort where plenty of people tell you what the issues are, but are typically lighter on what to do about them. This class covers why this is, as well as dealing with all of these areas and presents detailed strategies, tools and methods to address them. Furthermore, aside from the 500+ page manual of meaty governance goodness, as a take home, we supply a CD for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator and sample mind maps of Information Architecture.

At last count there were 5 places left for the Vancouver class, so if you have been pondering if it is a worthwhile class, check out some of the feedback from the class web site. Also, if you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please pass the course flyer and registration site details to them. We always end up with people who tell us “Ah – if only I knew about the class!!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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Hi all

Welcome to my fifth post that delves into the irrational world of cloud computing. After examining the not-so-obvious aspects of Microsoft, Amazon and the industry more broadly, its time to shift focus a little. Now the appeal of the cloud really depends on your perspective. To me, there are three basic motivations for getting in on the act…

1. I can make a buck
2. I can save a buck
3. I can save a buck (and while I am at it, escape my pain-in-the-ass IT department)

If you haven’t guessed it, this post will examine #3, and look at what the cloud means for the the perennial issue of the IT department and business disconnect. I recently read an article over at CIO magazine where they coined the term “Server Huggers” to describe the phenomenon I am about to describe. So to set the flavour for this discussion, let me tell you about the biggest secret in organisational life…

We all have an identity crisis (so get over it).

In organizations, there are roles that I would call transactional (i.e. governed by process and clear KPI’s) and those that are knowledge-based (governed by gut feel and insight). Whilst most roles actually entail both of these elements, most of us in SharePoint land are the latter. In fact we actually spend a lot of time in meeting rooms “strategizing” the solutions that our more transactionally focused colleagues will be using to meet their KPI’s. Beyond SharePoint, this also applies to Business Analysts, Information Architects, Enterprise Architects, Project Managers and pretty much anyone with the word “senior”, “architect”, “analyst”  or “strategic” in their job title.

But there is a big, fat, elephant in the “strategizing room” of certain knowledge worker roles that is at the root of some irrational organisational behaviour. Many of us are suffering a role-based identity crisis. To explain this, lets pick a straw-man example of one of the most conflicted roles of all right now: Information Architects.

One challenge with the craft of IA is pace of change, since IA today looks very different from its library and taxonomic roots. Undoubtedly, it will look very different ten years from now too as it gets assailed from various other roles and perspectives, each believing their version of rightness is more right. Consider this slightly abridged quote from Joshua Porter:

Worse, the term “information architecture” has over time come to encompass, as suggested by its principal promoters, nearly every facet of not just web design, but Design itself. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the latest update of Rosenfeld and Morville’s O’Reilly title, where the definition has become so expansive that there is now little left that isn’t information architecture […] In addition, the authors can’t seem to make up their minds about what IA actually is […] (a similar affliction pervades the SIGIA mailing list, which has become infamous for never-ending definition battles.) This is not just academic waffling, but evidence of a term too broadly defined. Many disciplines often reach out beyond their initial borders, after catching on and gaining converts, but IA is going to the extreme. One technologist and designer I know even referred to this ever-growing set of definitions as the “IA land-grab”, referring to the tendency that all things Design are being redefined as IA.

You can tell when a role is suffering an identity crisis rather easily too. It is when people with the current role start to muse that the title no longer reflects what they do and call for new roles to better reflect the environment they find themselves in. Evidence for this exists further in Porter’s post. Check out the line I marked with bold below:

In addition, this shift is already happening to information architects, who, recognizing that information is only a byproduct of activity, increasingly adopt a different job title. Most are moving toward something in the realm of “user experience”, which is probably a good thing because it has the rigor of focusing on the user’s actual experience. Also, this as an inevitable move, given that most IAs are concerned about designing great things. IA Scott Weisbrod, sees this happening too: “People who once identified themselves as Information Architects are now looking for more meaningful expressions to describe what they do – whether it’s interaction architect or experience designer”

So while I used the example of Information Architects as an example of how pace of change causes an identity crisis, the advent of the cloud doesn’t actually cause too many IA’s (or whatever they choose to call themselves) to lose too much sleep. But there are other knowledge-worker roles that have not really felt the effects of change in the same way as their IA cousins. In fact, for the better part of twenty years one group have actually benefited greatly from pace of change. Only now is the ground under their feet starting to shift, and the resulting behaviours are starting to reflect the emergence of an identity crisis that some would say is long overdue.

IT Departments and the cloud

At a SharePoint Saturday in 2011, I was on a panel and we were asked by an attendee what effect Office 365 and other cloud based solutions might have on a traditional IT infrastructure role. This person asking was an infrastructure guy and his question was essentially around how his role might change as cloud solutions becomes more and more mainstream. Of course, all of the SharePoint nerds on the panel didn’t want to touch that question with a bargepole and all heads turned to me since apparently I am “the business guy”. My reply was that he was sensing a change – commoditisation of certain aspects of IT roles. Did that mean he was going to lose his job? Unlikely, but nevertheless when  change is upon us, many of us tend to place more value on what we will lose compared to what we will gain. Our defence mechanisms kick in.

But lets take this a little further: The average tech guy comes in two main personas. The first is the tech-cowboy who documents nothing, half completes projects then loses interest, is oblivious to how much they are in over their head and generally gives IT a bad name. They usually have a lot of intellectual intelligence (IQ), but not so much emotional intelligence (EQ). Ben Curry once referred to this group as “dumb smart guys.” The second persona is the conspiracy theorist who had to clean up after such a cowboy. This person usually has more skills and knowledge than the first guy, writes documentation and generally keeps things running well. Unfortunately, they also can give IT a bad name. This is because, after having to pick up the pieces of something not of their doing, they tend to develop a mother hen reflex based on a pathological fear of being paged at 9pm to come in and recover something they had no part in causing. The aforementioned cowboys rarely last the distance and therefore over time, IT departments begin to act as risk minimisers, rather than business enablers.

Now IT departments will never see it this way of course, instead believing that they enable the business because of their risk minimisation. Having spent 20 years being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, security-type IT guy, I totally get why this happens as I was the living embodiment of this attitude for a long time. Technology is getting insanely complex while users innate ability to do some really risky and dumb is increasing. Obviously, such risk needs to be managed and accordingly, a common characteristic of such an IT department is the word “no” to pretty much any question that involves introducing something new (banning iPads or espousing the evils of DropBox are the best examples I can think of right now). When I wrote about this issue in the context of SharePoint user adoption back in 2008, I had this to say:

The mother hen reflex should be understood and not ridiculed, as it is often the user’s past actions that has created the reflex. But once ingrained, the reflex can start to stifle productivity in many different ways. For example, for an employee not being able to operate at full efficiency because they are waiting 2 days for a helpdesk request to be actioned is simply not smart business. Worse still, a vicious circle emerges. Frustrated with a lack of response, the user will take matters into their own hands to improve their efficiency. But this simply plays into the hands of the mother hen reflex and for IT this reinforces the reason why such controls are needed. You just can’t trust those dog-gone users! More controls required!

The long term legacy of increasing technical complexity and risk is that IT departments become slow-moving and find it difficult to react to pace of change. Witness the number of organisations still running parts of their business on Office 2003, IE6 and Windows XP. The rest of the organisation starts to resent using old tools and the imposition of process and structure for no tangible gain. The IT department develops a reputation of being difficult to deal with and taking ages to get anything done. This disconnect begins to fester, and little by little both IT and “the business” develop a rose-tinged view of themselves (which is known as groupthink) and a misguided perception of the other.

At the end of the day though, irrespective of logic or who has the moral high ground in the debate, an IT department with a poor reputation will eventually lose. This is because IT is no longer seen as a business enabler, but as a cost-center. Just as organisations did with the IT outsourcing fad over the last decade, organisational decision makers will read CIO magazine articles about server huggers look longingly to the cloud, as applications become more sophisticated and more and more traditional vendors move into the space, thus legitimising it. IT will be viewed, however unfairly, as a burden where the cost is not worth the value realised. All the while, to conservative IT, the cloud represents some of their worst fears realised. Risk! risk! risk! Then the vicious circle of the mother-hen reflex will continue because rogue cloud applications will be commissioned without IT knowledge or approval. Now we are back to the bad old days of rogue MSAccess or SharePoint deployments that drives the call for control based governance in the first place!

<nerd interlude>

Now to the nerds reading this post who find it incredibly frustrating that their organisation will happily pump money into some cloud-based flight of fancy, but whine when you want to upgrade the network, I want you to take take note of this paragraph as it is really (really) important! I will tell you the simple reason why people are more willing to spend more money on fluffy marketing than IT. In the eyes of a manager who needs to make a profit, sponsoring a conference or making the reception area look nice is seen as revenue generating. Those who sign the cheques do not like to spend capital on stuff unless they can see that it directly contributes to revenue generation! Accordingly, a bunch of servers (and for that matter, a server room) are often not considered expenditure that generates revenue but are instead considered overhead! Overhead is something that any smart organisation strives to reduce to remain competitive. The moral of the story? Stop arguing cloud vs. internal on what direct costs are incurred because people will not care! You would do much better to demonstrate to your decision makers that IT is not an overhead. Depending on how strong your mother hen reflex is and how long it has been in place, that might be an uphill battle.

</nerd interlude>

Defence mechanisms…

Like the poor old Information Architect, the rules of the game are changing for IT with regards to cloud solutions. I am not sure how it will play out, but I am already starting to see the defence mechanisms kicking in. There was a CIO interviewed in the “Server Huggers” article that I referred to earlier (Scott Martin) who was hugely pro-cloud. He suggested that many CIO’s are seeing cloud solutions as a threat to the empire they have built:

I feel like a lot of CIOs are in the process of a kind of empire building.  IT empire builders believe that maintaining in-house services helps justify their importance to the company. Those kinds of things are really irrational and not in the best interest of the company […] there are CEO’s who don’t know anything about technology, so their trusted advisor is the guy trying to protect his job.

A client of mine in Sydney told me he enquired to his IT department about the use of hosted SharePoint for a multi-organisational project and the reply back was a giant “hell no,” based primarily on fear, uncertainty and doubt. With IT, such FUD is always cloaked in areas of quite genuine risk. There *are* many core questions that we must ask cloud vendors when taking the plunge because to not do so would be remiss (I will end this post with some of those questions). But the key issue is whether the real underlying reason behind those questions is to shut down the debate or to genuinely understand the risks and implications of moving to the cloud.

How can you tell an IT department is likely using a FUD defence? Actually, it is pretty easily because conservative IT is very predictable – they will likely try and hit you with what they think is their slam-dunk counter argument first up. Therefore, they will attempt to bury the discussion with the US Patriot Act Issue. I’ve come across this issue and and Mark Miller at FPWeb mentioned to me that this comes up all the time when they talk about SharePoint hosting to clients. (I am going to cover the Patriot Act issue in the next post because it warrants a dedicated post).

If the Patriot Act argument fails to dent unbridled cloud enthusiasm, the next layer of defence is to highlight cloud based security (identity, authentication and compliance) as well as downtime risk, citing examples such as the September outage of Office 365, SalesForce.com’s well publicized outages, the Amazon outage that took out Twitter, Reddit, Foursquare, Turntable.fm, Netflix and many, many others. The fact that many IT departments do not actually have the level of governance and assurance of their systems that they aspire to will be conveniently overlooked. 

Failing that, the last line of defence is to call into question the commercial viability of cloud providers. We talked about the issues facing the smaller players in the last post, but It is not just them. What if the provider decides to change direction and discontinue a service? Google will likely be cited, since it has a habit of axing cloud based services that don’t reach enough critical mass (the most recent casualty is Google health being retired as I write this).  The risk of a cloud provider going out of business or withdrawing a service is a much more serious risk than when a software supplier fails. At least when its on premise you still have the application running and can use it.

Every FUD defence is based on truth…

Now as I stated above, all of the concerns listed above are genuine things to consider before embarking on a cloud strategy. Prudent business managers and CIOs must weigh the pros and cons of cloud offering before rushing into a deployment that may not be appropriate for their organisation. Equally though, its important to be able to see through a FUD defence when its presented. The easiest way to do this is do some of your own investigations first.

To that end, you can save yourself a heap of time by checking out the work of Richard Harbridge. Richard did a terrific cloud talk at the most recent Share 2011 conference. You can view his slide deck here and I recommend really going through slides 48-81. He has provided a really comprehensive summary of considerations and questions to ask. Among other things, he offered a list of questions that any organisation should be asking providers of cloud services. I have listed some of them below and encourage you to check out his slide deck as it is really comprehensive and covers way more than what I have covered here.

Conclusion and looking forward…

For some organisations, the lure of cloud solutions is very seductive. From a revenue perspective, it saves a lot of capital expenditure. From a time perspective, it can be deployed very quickly and and from a maintenance perspective, takes the burden away from IT. Sounds like a winner when put that way. But the real issue is that the changing cloud paradigm potentially impacts the wellbeing of some IT professionals and IT departments because it calls into question certain patterns and practices within established roles. It also represents a loss of control and as I said earlier, people often place a higher value on what they will lose compared to what they will gain.

Irrespective of this, whether you are a new age cloud loving CIO or a server hugger, any decision to move to the cloud should be about real business outcomes. Don’t blindly accept what the sales guy tells you. Understand the risks as well as the benefits. Leverage the work Richard has done and ask the cloud providers the hard questions. Look for real world stories (like my second and third articles in this series) which illustrate where the services have let people down.

For some, cloud will be very successful. For others, the gap between expectations and reality will come with a thud.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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Hi

Those of you who get an RSS feed of this blog might have noticed it was busy over last week. This is because I pushed out 4 blog posts that showed my analysis using IBIS of a detailed linear discussion on LinkedIn. To save people getting lost in the analysis, I thought I’d quickly post a bit of an executive summary from the exercise.

To set context, Issue Mapping is a technique of visually capturing rationale. It is graphically represented using a simple, but powerful, visual structure called IBIS (Issue Based Information System). IBIS allows all elements and rationale of a conversation to be captured in a manner that can be easily reflected upon. Unlike prose, which is linear, the advantage of visually representing argument structure is it helps people to form a better mental model of the nature of a problem or issue. Even better, when captured this way, makes it significantly easier to identify emergent themes or key aspects to an issue.

You can find out all about IBIS and Dialogue Mapping in my new book, at the Cognexus site or the other articles on my blog.

The challenge…

On the Intranet Professionals group on LinkedIn recently, the following question was asked:

What are the main three reasons users cannot find the content they were looking for on intranet?

In all, there were more than 60 responses from various people with some really valuable input. I decided that it might be an interesting experiment to capture this discussion using the IBIS notion to see if it makes it easier for people to understand the depth of the issue/discussion and reach a synthesis of root causes.

I wrote 4 posts, each building on the last, until I had covered the full conversation. For each post, I supplied an analysis of how I created the IBIS map and then exported the maps themselves. You can follow those below:

Part 1 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-in-ibis-synthesispart-1/
Part 2 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-2/
Part 3 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-3/
Part 4 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-4/

Final map: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/maps/findstuffpart4/Linkedin_Discussion__192168031326631637693.html

For what its worth, the summary of themes from the discussion was that there were 5 main reasons for users not finding what they are looking for on the intranet.

1. Poor information architecture
2. Issues with the content itself
3. People and change aspects
4. Inadequate governance
5. Lack of user-centred design

Within these areas or “meta-themes” there were varied sub issues. These are captured in the table below.

So now you have seen the final output, be sure to visit the maps and analysis and read about the journey on how this table emerged. One thing is for sure, it sure took me a hell of a lot longer to write about it than to actually do it!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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Hi all

Welcome to my second post that delves into the irrational world of cloud computing. In the first post, I described my first foray into the world of web hosting, which started way back in 2000. Back then I was more naive than I am now (although when it comes to predicting the future I am as naive as anybody else.) I concluded Part 1 by asserting that cloud computing is an adaptive change. We are going to explore the effects of this and the challenges it poses in the next few posts.

Adaptive change occurs in a number of areas, including the companies providing a cloud application – especially if on-premise has been the basis of their existence previously. To that end, I’d like to tell you an Office 365 fail story and then see what lessons we can draw from it.

Office 365 and Software as a Service…

For those who have ignored the hype, Office 365 known in cloud speak as “Software as a Service” (SaaS). Basically one gets SharePoint, Exchange mail, web versions of Office Applications and Lync all bundled up together. In Office 365, SharePoint is not run on-premise at all, and instead it is all run from Microsoft servers in a subscription arrangement. Once a month you pay Microsoft for the number of users using the service and the world is a happy place.

Office 365, like many SaaS models, keeps much of the complexity of managing SharePoint in the hands of Microsoft. A few years back, Office 365 would have been described in hosting terms as a managed service. Like all managed services, one sacrifices a certain level of control by outsourcing the accompanying complexity. You do not manage or control the underlying cloud infrastructure including network, servers, operating systems, SharePoint farm settings or storage. Furthermore, limited custom code will run on Office 365, because developers do not have back-end access. Only sandbox solutions are available, and even then, there are some additional limitations when compared to on-premise sandbox solutions. You have limited control of SharePoint service applications too, so the best way to think about Office 365 is that your administrative control extends to the site collection level (this is not actually true but suffices for this series.)

One key reason why its hard to get feature parity between on-premise and SaaS equivalents is because many SaaS architectures are based around the concept of multitenancy. If you have heard this word bandied about in SharePoint land is because it is something that is supported in SharePoint 2010. But the concept extends to the majority of SaaS providers. To understand it, imagine an swanky office building in the up-market part of town. It has a bunch of companies that rent out office space and are therefore tenants. No tenant can afford an entire building, so they all lease office space from the building and enjoy certain economies of scale like a great location, good parking, security and so on. This does have a trade-off though. The tenants have to abide by certain restrictions. An individual tenant can’t just go and paint the building green because it matches their branding. Since the building is a shared resource, it is unlikely the other tenants would approve.

Multi tenancy allows the SaaS vendor to support multiple customers with a single platform. The advantages of this model is economies of scale, but the trade-off is the aforementioned customisation flexibility. SaaS vendors will talk up this by telling you that SaaS applications can be updated more frequently than on-premise software, since there is less customisation complexity from each individual customer. While that’s true, it nevertheless means a loss of control or choice in areas like data security, integration with on-premise systems, latency and flexibility of the application to accommodate change as an organisation grows.

A small example of the restricting effect of multi-tenancy is when you upload a PDF into a SharePoint document library in Office 365. You cannot open the PDF in the browser and instead you are prompted to save it locally. This is because of a well-known issue with a security feature that was added to IE8. In the on-premise SharePoint world, you can modify the behaviour by changing the “Browser File Handling” option in the settings of the affected Web Application. But with Office 365, you have to live with it (or use a less than elegant workaround) because you do not have any access at a web application level to change the behaviour. Changing it will affect any tenants serviced by that web application.

Minor annoyances aside, if you are a small organisation or you need to mobilise quickly on a project with a geographically dispersed team, Office 365 is a very sweet offering. It is powerful and integrated, and while not fully featured compared to on-premise SharePoint, it is nonetheless impressive. One can move very quickly and be ready to go with within one or two business days – that is, if you don’t make a typo…

How a typo caused the world to cave in…

A while back, I was part of a geographically dispersed, multi-organisation team that needed a collaborative portal for around a year. Given the project team was distributed across varying organisations, various parts of Australia, the fact that one of the key stakeholders had suggested SharePoint, and the fact that Office 365 behaved much better than Google apps behind overly paranoid proxy servers of participating organisations, Office 365 seemed ideal and we resolved to use it. I signed up to a Microsoft Office 365 E3 service.

Now when I say sign up, Microsoft uses Telstra in Australia as their Office 365 partner, so I was directed to Telstra’s sign up site. My first hint of trouble to come was when I was asked to re-enter my email address in the signup field. Through some JavaScript wizard no doubt, I was unable to copy/paste my email address into the confirmation field. They actually made me re-type it. “Hmm” I thought, “they must really be interested in data validation. At least it reduces the chance that people do not copy/paste the wrong information into a critical field.” I also noted that there was also some nice JavaScript that suggested the strength of the password chosen as it was typed.

But that’s where the fun ended. Soon after entering the necessary detail, and obligatory payment details, I am asked to enter a mysterious thing listed only as an Organization Level Attribute and more specifically, “Microsoft Online Services Company Identifier.” Checking the question mark icon tells me that it is “used to create your Microsoft Online Services account identity.”

I wondered if this was the domain name for the site, as there was no descriptive indicator as to the significance of this code. For all I knew, it could be a Microsoft admin code or accounting code. Nevertheless I assumed it was the domain name because I just had a feeling it was. So I entered my online identity and away I went. I got a friendly email message to say things were in motion and I waited my obligatory hour or so for things to provision.

The inbox sound chimes and I received two emails. One told me I now have a “Telstra t-Suite account” and the other is entitled “Registration confirmation from Microsoft online.” I was thanked for purchasing and the email stated that “the services are managed via Microsoft Online Portal (MOP), a separate portal to the Telstra T-Suite Management Console.” I had no idea what the Telstra T-Suite Management Console was at this point, but I was invited to log into the Microsoft Online Portal with a supplied username and password.

At this point I swore…I could see by my username, that I made a typo in the Microsoft Online Services Company Identifier. Username: admin@SampleProjject.onmicrosoft.com – which means I typed in “SampleProjject” instead of “SampleProject” (Aargh!)

The saga begins…

Swearing at my dyslexic typing, I logged a support call to Telstra in the faint hope that I can change this before it’s too late… Below is the anonymised mail I sent:

“Hiya

In relation to the order below I accidentally set SampleProjject as the identifier when it should be SampleProject. Can this be rectified before things are commissioned?

Thanks

Paul”

Another hour passed by and my inbox chimed again with a completely unsurprising reply to my query.

“Hi Paul , sorry but company identifier can not be changed because it is used to identify the account in Office 365 database.”

Cursing once again at my own lack of checking, I cannot help but shake my head in that while I was forced to type in my email address twice (and with cut and paste disabled) when I signed up to Office 365, I was given no opportunity to verify the Microsoft Online Services Company Identifier (henceforth known as MOSI) before giving the final go-ahead. Surely this identifier is just as important as the email address? Therefore, why not ask for it to be entered twice or visually make it clear what the purpose of this identifier is? Then dumb users like me would get a second chance before opening the hellgate, unleashing forces that can never be contained.

At the end of the day though, the fault was mine so while I think Telstra could do better with their validation and conveying the significance of the MOSI, I caused the issue. 

Forces are unleashed…

So I log into Telstra’s t-suite system and try and locate my helpdesk call entry. The t-suite site, although not SharePoint, has a bit of a web part feel about it – only like when you have fixed the height of a web part far too small. It turned out that their site doesn’t handle IE9 well. If you look closely the “my helpdesk cases” and “my service access” are collapsed to the point that I can’t actually see anything. So I tried Chrome and was able to operate the portal like a normal person would. My teeth gnashed once more…

Finally, being able to take an action, I open my support request and ask the following:

*** NOTES created by Paul Culmsee
Can I cancel this account and re provision? A typo was made when the MOSI was entered.  The domain name is incorrect for the site.

A few emails went back and forth and I received a confirmation that the account is cancelled. I then return to the Office 365 site and re-apply for an E3 service. This time I triple checked my spelling of the MOSI and clicked “proceed.” I received an email that thanked me for my application and that I should receive a provisioning notification within an hour or so.

So I wait…

and wait…

and wait…

and wait…

24 hours went by and I received no notification of the E3 service being provisioned. I log into Telstra’s t-suite and log a new call, asking when things will be provisioned. Here is what I asked…

Hi there, I have had no notification of this being provisioned from Microsoft. Surely this should be done by now?

In typical level 1 helpdesk fashion, the guy on the other end did not actually read what I wrote. He clearly missed the word “no”

Hi Paul,

that’s affirmative. Your T-Suite order has been provisioned. As per the instructions in the welcome email you can follow the links to log in to portal.

Contact me on 1800TSUITE Option 2.3 to discuss it further. I’ll keep this case open for a week.

*sigh* – this sort of bad level 1 email support actually does a lot of damage to the reputation of the organisation so I mail back…

But I received no welcome email from Microsoft with the online password details… I have no means to log into the portal

This inane exchange costs me half a day, so I took Telstra’s friendly advice and contacted them “on 1800TSUITE Option 2.3 to discuss it further.” I got a pretty good tech who realised there indeed was a problem. He told me he would look into it and I thanked him for his time. Sometime later he called back and advised me that something was messed up in the provisioning process and that the easiest thing to do, was for him to delete my most recent E3 application, and for me to sign up from scratch using a totally different email address and a totally new MOSI. Somehow, either Telstra’s or Microsoft’s systems had associated my email address and MOSI with the original, failed attempt to sign up (the one with the typo), and it was causing the provisioning process to have an exception somewhere along the line.

In hearing this, I can imagine some giant PowerShell provisioning script with dodgy exception handling getting halfway through and then dying on them. So I was happy to follow the tech’s advice went through the entire Office 365 sign up process from the very beginning again (this is the third time). This time I used a fresh email address and quadruple checked all of the fields before I provisioned. Eureka! This time things worked as planned. I received all the right confirmation emails and I was able to sign into the Microsoft online portal. From there I created user accounts, provisioned a SharePoint site collection and we were ready to rock and roll. Although the entire saga ended up taking 5 business days from start to finish, I have my portal and the project team got down to business.

Now for what it’s worth, it should be noted that if you are an integrator or are in the business of managing multiple Office 365 services, Telstra requires a different email address to be used for each Office 365 service you purchase. One cannot have an alias like provision@myoffice365supportprovider as the general account used to provision multiple E1-E4 services. Each needs its own t-suite account with a different email address.

Plunged into darkness…

Things hummed along for a couple of months with no hiccups. We received an invoice for the service by email, and then a couple of days later, received a mail to confirm that in fact the invoice has been automatically paid via credit card. For our purposes, Office 365 was a really terrific solution and the project team really liked it and were getting a lot of value out off it.

I then had to travel overseas and while I was gone, suddenly the project team were unable to login to the portal. They would receive a “subscription expired” message when attempting to login. Now this was pretty serious as a project team was coming to an important deadline and now no-one could log in.  We checked the VISA records and it seemed that the latest invoice had not been deducted from the account as there was still a balance owing. Since I was in overseas, one of my colleagues immediately called up Telstra support (it was now after hours in Perth) and was stuck in a queue for an hour and then ended up speaking to two support people. After all of the fuss with the provisioning issues around the MOSI and my typo, it seemed that Telstra support didn’t actually know what a MOSI was in any event. This is what my colleague said:

I was asked for an account number straight away both times, and I explained that I didn’t have one, but I did have the invoice number in question, and that this was a Microsoft Office 365 subscription. They were still unable to locate the account or invoice. I then gave them the MOSI, thinking this would help. Unfortunately, they both had no idea what I was talking about! I explained that users were unable to login to the site with a ‘subscription expired’ error message. I also explained the fact that the VISA had not been processed for this period (although it was fine in the last period).

Both support staff could not access the Office 365 subscription information (even after I gave them our company name). Because I called after hours, t-suite department was not available. The two staff I talked to could not access the account, so could not pull up any of the relevant details. It turns out that after business hours, Telstra redirect t-suite support to the mobile and phones department. The first support person passed me onto technical but the transfer was rerouted to the original call menu – so I went through the whole thing again, press x for this, press x for that, etc. The second time round, I explained it all over again. The tech assured me that it couldn’t be a billing issue and that Telstra generally would not suspend an account because of a few days late payment. If that was the case, prior to suspension, Telstra would send out an email to notify customers of overdue payment. I told him that no such email had been sent. He then said that it would most likely be a technical problem and would have to be dealt with the next day as the T-suite department would not be available til next morning between office hours 9-5pm EST.

I hung up frustrated, no closer to solving the problem after two hours on the phone.

My colleague then got up early and called Telstra at 6am the next day (9am EST is 3 hours ahead of Perth time). She explained the situation again to Telstra t-suite support person all over again. Here again is the words of my colleague:

The first person who took my call (who I will call “girl one”) couldn’t give me an answer and said she’d get someone to call back, and in the meantime she’d check with another department for me. She put me on hold and during this time the call was re-routed back to the original menu when you first call. I thought that instead of waiting for a call that I may not receive soon as this was an emergency, I went through the menu again. This time I got “girl two” and explained the whole thing *again*. I got her to double check that the E3 subscription was set to automatically deduct from the VISA supplied – yes, it was. She noticed that it said 0 licenses available. She told me that she was not sure what that was all about, so would log a call with Microsoft. Girl two advised me that it could take any time between an hour to a few days for a response from Microsoft.

I then got a call from Telstra (girl three) on the cell-phone just after I finished with girl two. This was the person who girl one promised would call back. I told her what I’d gone through with all support staff so far, and that “girl two” was going to log a call with Microsoft. Girl three, like girl two, noticed the 0 licenses available. She wasn’t sure that it was because there were none to begin with or that there were no more available. I stated that the site had been working fine till yesterday. I explained that no one could access the site and that they all got the same message. Same as girl two, girl three advised that she would also log a call with Microsoft. Again, I was told that it could take up to several days before I could get a reply.

Half an hour later, we received an email from Telstra t-suite support. It stated the following:

Case Number: xxxxxxxx-xxxxxxx

Case Subject: subscription has expired for all users

I checked your account info and invoices. The invoice xxxxx paid for 01 Oct to 01 Nov was for company ID SampleProjject not SampleProject. Please call billing department to change it for you.

With this email, we now knew that the core problem here was related to billing in some way. As far as we had been told, Telstra had deleted the original two failed Office 365 subscriptions, but apparently not from their billing systems. The bill was paid against a phantom E3 service – the deleted one called “SampleProjject”. Accordingly the live service had expired and users were locked out of the system.

As instructed in the above email, my colleague called up t-suite billing (there was a phone number on the invoice). In her words:

Once again, the support person asked for the account number to which I said I didn’t have one. I offered him the invoice number and the MOSI, thinking someone’s got to know what it was since it was ‘used to identify the account in Office 365 database.’ He stated he could not ‘pull up an account with the MOSI’ and said something to the effect that he didn’t know what the MOSI ‘was all about’. He asked what company registered the service and I gave him our details. He immediately saw several ‘accounts’ in the billing system related to our company. He noted that the production E3 was a trial subscription and the trial had now expired and he surmised that the problem was most likely due to that fact. I queried why this was the case when the payment subscription was set to automatically deduct from the supplied visa account. He told me that as going from trial to production was a sales thing, I would have to speak to t-suite sales department. He also added that we were lucky because there was a risk that the mistakenly expired E3 service could have been deleted from Office 365.

I called up sales and finally, they were able to correct the problem.

So after a long, stressful and chaotic evening and morning, Armageddon was averted and the portal users were able to log in again.

Reflections…

This whole story started from something seemingly innocuous – a typo that I made on a poorly described text box (MOSI). From it, came a chain of events that could have resulted in a production E3 service being mistakenly deleted. There were multiple failures at various levels (including my bad typing that set this whole thing off). Nevertheless, first thing that becomes obvious is that this was a high risk issue that had utterly nothing to do with the Office 365 service itself. As I said, the feedback from the project team has been overwhelmingly positive for Office 365. There was no bug or no extended outage because of any technical factors. Instead, it was the lack of resilience in the systems and processes that surround the Office 365 service. At the end of the day, we got almost nailed because of a billing screw-up. It was exacerbated by some poor technical support outcomes. Witness the number of people and departments my colleague had to go through to get a straight answer, as well as the two times she was redirected back to the main phone menuing system when she was supposed to be transferred.

Now I don’t blame any of the tech support staff (okay, except the first guy who did not read my initial query). I think that the tech support themselves were equally hamstrung by immature process and poor integration of systems. What was truly scary about this issue was that it snuck up upon us from left field. We thought the issue was resolved once the service was finally provisioned (third time lucky), and had email receipts of paid invoices. Yet this near fatal flaw was there all along, only manifesting some three months later when the evaluation period expired.

I think there are a number of specific aspects to this story that Microsoft needs to reflect on. I have summarised these below:

• Why is the registration process to sign up to Office 365 via Telstra such a complete fail of the “Don’t Make Me Think” test.
• Why is the significance of the MOSI not made more clear when you first enter it (given you have to enter your email address twice)?
• Why did no-one at all in Telstra support have the faintest idea what a MOSI is?
• When you entrust your data and service to a cloud provider how confident do you feel when tech support completely misinterprets your query and answers a completely opposite question?
• How do you think customers with a critical issue feel when the company that sits between you and Microsoft tells you that it will take “between an hour to a few days for a response from Microsoft”. Vote of confidence?
• How do you think customers with a critical issue feel when the company that sits between you and Microsoft redirects tech support to their cell phone division after hours?
• How do you think customers with a critical issue feel when the company that sits between you and Microsoft has to pass you around from department to department to solve an issue, and along the way, re-route you back to the main support line?
• We were advised to delete our E3 accounts and start all over again. Why did Telstra’s systems not delete the service out of their billing systems? Presumably they are not integrated, given that from a billing perspective, the old E3 service was still there?

Now I hope that I don’t sound bitter and twisted from this experience. In fact, the experience reinforced what most in IT strategy already know. It’s not about the technology. I still like what Office 365 offers and I will continue to use and recommend it under the right circumstances. This experience was simply a sobering reality check though that all of the cool features amounts to naught when it can be undone by dodgy underlying supporting structures. I hope that Microsoft and Telstra read this and learn from it too. From a customer perspective, having to work through Telstra as a proxy for Microsoft feels like additional layers of defence on behalf of Microsoft. Is all of this duplication really necessary? Why can’t Australian customers work directly with Microsoft like the US can?

Moving on…

No cloud provider is immune to these sorts of stories – and for that matter no on-premise provider is immune either. So for Amazon fanboys out there who want to take this post as evidence to dump on Microsoft, I have some news for you too. In the next post in this series, I am going to tell you an Amazon EC2 story that, while not being an issue that resulted in an outage, nevertheless represents some very short sighted dumbass policies. The result of which, we are literally forced to hand our business to another cloud provider.

Until then, thanks for reading and happy clouding

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Hiya

I have been meaning to write a post or three on cloud computing, and its benefits, challenges and eventual legacy. I’ve finally had some time to do so. This series will span over a few posts (not sure how many at this stage) and will focus mainly on SharePoint. In short, I think the cloud is a shining example of innovation, combined with human irrationality, poorly thought out process with a dash of organisational dysfunction. In this first post, I will give you a little cloud history lesson, through the eyes of a slightly jaded IT infrastructure person. To that end, I will try and do the following throughout this series:

• Educate readers to some conceptual aspects of cloud computing and why it matters
• Highlight aspects to cloud computing that are current being conveniently overlooked by proponents (and opponents)
• Look at what the real challenges are, not just for organisations utilising it, but for the organisations providing cloud services
• Highlight what the future might look like from a couple of perspectives
• As always, take a relatively dry topic and try and make this entertaining enough that you will want to read it through

So let’s roll the clock back a decade or so and set the scene…

In the beginning…

In the height of the dotcom boom of 2000, I took a high paying contract position for a miner-turned-ISP. You see, back then it was all the rage for “penny stock” mining companies – who had never actually dug anything of value out of the ground – to embrace “The interweb” by becoming an Internet Service Provider. Despite having no idea whatsoever about what it entailed to be an ISP, instantly they would enjoy at least a fiftyfold increase in stock price and all the adulation of those dotcom investors who actually believed that there was money to be made.

Lured from my stable job by the hubris-funded per-hour rate and a cooler job title, I designed and ran an ISP from late 1999 till late 2004, doing all things security, Linux, Cisco and Microsoft. Back then, the buzzword of choice was “hosting”. Of course, the dotcom bubble popped big time and the market collapsed back to cold hard reality pretty quickly. Like all organisations that rode the wave, we then had to survive the backwash of a pretty severe bear market. Accordingly, my hourly rate went down and our ISP sales guys dutifully sold “hosting solutions” to clients that were neither useful nor appropriate. The best example of this is when someone sold a hosted exchange server to a company of 300 staff with no consideration whatsoever of bandwidth, security and authentication (remember that this was the era of Exchange 2000, immature Active Directory deployments and 1.5/256 megabit ADSL connections).

We actually learnt a lot from dumbass stuff like this (and we went through a seemingly endless number of sales guys as a result). By the end of the journey, we did some good work and had a few success stories. The net result of riding the highs and lows of the dotcom boom, was my conclusion that if you had a public IP address and a communications rack with decent air conditioning, you were pretty much a hosting provider.

Then in 2004 I took a different job with a different company. They hired me because they had just acquired a fairly well-known “hosting provider” who had gone through some tough times. I was tasked with migrating the hosting infrastructure – and the sites hosted on it – to the parent company premises and integrate it with the existing infrastructure. So imagine my shock when on day one, I arrive onsite to see that the infrastructure of this hosting provider was essentially a store room, full of clone PC’s with panels removed, sitting in a couple of communications racks, with a cheap portable fan blowing onto it all to keep it cool and with no redundant power (in fact one power cord was sticky taped to the floor and led out the room to the nearest outlet). As it happened, some very high profile websites ran on this infrastructure.

This period I describe as “my bitter and twisted days” as I had a limited time to somehow migrate this mess to the more robust infrastructure of the parent company. This was the period where I became a bit of an IT control freak and used to take a dim view of web developers who dared to ask me a dumb question. I also subsequently revised my view of hosting. I decided that if you had a public IP address and a comms rack with completely crap air conditioning, you were pretty much a hosting provider. After all, when you access a website, did you ever stop to consider where it physically might reside?

…and henceforth came “the cloud”

Before SharePoint 2010 came out, I used to do talks where I put up the SharePoint 2007 pie and asked people what buzzword was missing. Many hands would rise and the answer was always “cloud”. Cognisant of this, I redrew Microsoft’s marketing diagram to try and capture the essence of this this new force in enterprise IT. I suggested that Microsoft would jump on the cloud big-time with SharePoint 2010. How do you think I did?

As it turned out, Microsoft for some reason opted not to use my suggested logo and instead went with that blue Frisbee with fresh buzzwords to replace the 2007 ones that had reached their saturation point. Nevertheless, the picture above did turn out to be prophetic: The era of the cloud is most definitely upon us, along with the gushing praise that often accompanies any flavour of the year technology.

Now in one sense, nothing much has changed from the days of web hosting. If you have an IP address with a webserver on the end of it, you can pretty much call yourself a cloud provider. This is because at the end of the day, we are still using the core ingredients of TCPIP, DNS, HTTP, communications racks and supposedly good air conditioning. When you access something in “the cloud”, you have no visibility as to the quality of the infrastructure on the other end. For all you know, it could be a store room being kept cool with a dodgy fan and some sticky tape .

But while that’s a cynical view, its is also naively simplistic. Like all fads that come and go, things are always changed as a result. The truth is that there has been changes from the days of web hosting that will change the entire face of IT in the coming years.

The major difference between this era and the last is the advancement in technology beyond those core ingredients of TCPIP, DNS and HTTP. Bandwidth has became significantly cheaper, faster and more reliable. Virtualisation of servers (and services) not only gained momentum, but is now a mature technology. My own evidence for this fact is that I haven’t put SharePoint web front end servers onto non-virtualised infrastructure for a couple of years now. Add to that the fact that the tools and systems that we use to build web solutions are now much more powerful and sophisticated. As a result, “cloud” applications now reflect a level of sophistication and features way beyond their web based email origins. Look at Office 365 as a case in point. Microsoft have bet big-time on this type of offering. I’m sure that most architectural diagrams currently drawn all over Microsoft whiteboards for SharePoint vNext, will be all about reworking the plumbing to create feature parity between on-premise SharePoint and it’s cloud based equivalent.

It’s interesting stuff indeed.

Now, perhaps because I had an ISP/hosting ringside seat,  I could see all of this happening way back in 2000 – more than a decade ago. Not only could I see it, I experienced the pain of early adopters trying to do it (witness the example of the hosted Exchange 2000 “solution” I started this post with). But a decade later, cloud based infrastructure now realises the sort of capabilities that I was able to foresee in my ISP days. We have access to unlimited storage and scalability. With it, I can save massive time and effort to get complex systems up and running. In this fast-moving age we find ourselves in, being able to mobilise resources and be productive quickly is hugely important. Recognising this, companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft leverage their incredible economies of scale, as well as the sheer depth of technical expertise to make some rather compelling offerings. Bean counters (i.e. CFO’s and CIO’s with tight budgets) suddenly realised that the cost to “jack-in” to a cloud based solution is way less costly than the traditional manner of up-front costs of hardware, licensing, procurement and configuration.

The cloud offers minimal entry cost because for the most part, it is based on a pay-for-use model. You stop paying for it when you stop using it. Buying servers are forever, but the cloud is apparently not. Furthermore, the economies of scale that the big boys of the cloud space offer, usually far exceeds what can be done via internal IT resources anyway. This extends past sheer hardware scalability and includes security, reliability and performance monitoring. As a cloud provider customer, you will not just expect, but assume that companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google can use their deep pockets to hire the best of the best engineers, architects and security practitioners. Organisational decision makers look increasingly longingly at the cloud, in the face of internal IT costs being high.

Even the most traditional on-premise IT vendors are getting in on the act. Consider SAP, previously a bastion of the “on-premise” model. Their American division just shelled out US$3.4 billion to buy a cloud provider called SuccessFactors (3.4 billion = 50% premium to SuccessFactors share price.) Why did they do this? According to Paul Hamerman (the bold areas are mine).

"SAP’s cloud strategy has been struggling with time-to-market issues, and its core on-premise HR management software has been at competitive disadvantage with best-of-breed solutions in areas such as employee performance, succession planning and learning management. By acquiring SuccessFactors, SAP puts itself into a much stronger competitive position in human resources applications and reaffirms its commitment to software-as-a-service as a key business model."

If that wasn’t enough, consider some of Gartner’s predictions for 2012 and beyond. One notable predictions is that by year-end 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. Closer to home for me, I have a client who has a ten-year BHAG (known as a Big, Hairy Audacious Goal). While I can’t tell you what this goal is, I can tell you that they have identified a key success metric that currently takes them around 12 months to achieve. Their BHAG is to reduce this time from 12 months to 4 weeks and achieve this within a decade. Essentially they have a time-to-market issue – similar to what Hamerman outlined with SAP. By utilising cloud technology and being able to procure the necessary scalability at the click of a button and the swipe of a credit card, I was able to save them one month almost straight away and make a massive inroad to their organisation-wide strategic goal.

So it seems that in the rational world of key performance indicators and return on investment, and given the market trends of large, mainstream vendors going “cloud”, it would seem that we are in the midst of a revolution that has an unstoppable momentum. But of course, the world is not rational is it? If it were, then someone would be able to explain to me why the US still uses the imperial system given that every other country (save for Liberia and Myanmar) has now changed to metric (yes my US readers, the UK is actually metric).

The irrational road ahead…

In this first post I have painted a picture of the “new reality” – the realisation of what I first saw in 2000 is now upon us. While this first post might sound like gushing praise of all things cloud, rest assured that this is not the case. I deliberately titled this post “the cloud is not the problem” because we are going to dive into the seedy underbelly of this brave new cloudy world we find ourselves in. My contention is that cloud computing is an adaptive challenge, which by definition, questions certain established ways of doing things. Therefore it has an effect on the roles, beliefs, assumptions and values behind the established order. In the next post or three, we are going to explore some of the less rational sides of “the cloud” at a number of levels. Furthermore, the irrationality often tends to be dressed up as rationality, so we have to look behind the positive and negative straw-man arguments we are currently hearing about, to what is really going on. Along the way I hope to develop your “cloud computing strawman argument” radar, so you can smell manure when its inevitably dished out to you

The general breakdown of this series will be as follows:

I’ll start by chronicling my experience with Microsoft’s new Software as a Service (Saas) offering: Office 365, as well as Amazon’s Platform as a Service Offering (EC2). Both are terrific offerings, but are let down by things that have nothing to do with the technology. From there we will move into looking at some of the existing roles and paradigms that are impacted by the move to cloud solutions, and the defence mechanisms that will be employed to counter it. I’ll end the series by taking a look at the cloud from a longer term perspective, based on the notion of systems theory (which despite its drop-dead boring sounding premise is actually quite interesting).

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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About bloody time eh?

The Heretics Guide to Best Practices is now available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iUniverse.

]

In Paul and Kailash I have found kindred spirits who understand how messed up most organizations are, and how urgent it is that organizations discover what Buddhists call ‘expedient means’—not more ‘best practices’ or better change management for the enterprise, but transparent methods and theories that are simple to learn and apply, and that foster organizational intelligence as a natural expression of individual intelligence. This book is a bold step forward on that path, and it has the wonderful quality, like a walk at dawn through a beautiful park, of presenting profound insights with humor, precision, and clarity.”

—Jeff Conklin, Director, Cognexus Institute

“Hugely enjoyable, deeply reflective, and intensely practical. This book is about weaving human artistry and improvisation, with appropriate methods and technologies, in order to pool collective intelligence and wisdom under pressure.”

—Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK.

“This is a terrific piece of work: important, insightful, and very entertaining. Culmsee and Awati have produced a refreshing take on the problems that plague organisations, the problems that plague attempts to fix organisations, and what can be done to make things better. If you’re trying to deal with wicked problems in your organisation, then drop everything and read this book.”

—Tim Van Gelder, Principal Consultant, Austhink Consulting

“This book has been a brilliantly fun read. Paul and Kailash interweave forty years of management theory using entertaining and engaging personal stories. These guys know their stuff and demonstrate how it can be used via real world examples. As a long time blogger, lecturer and consultant/practitioner I have always been served well by contrarian approaches, and have sought stories and case studies to understand the reasons why my methods have worked. This book has helped me understand why I have been effective in dealing with complex business problems. Moreover, it has encouraged me to delve into the foundations of various management practices and thus further extend my professional skills.”

—Craig Brown, Director, Evaluator

                      

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Hiya

I have been wrong about many things – I am happy to admit that. In SharePoint land, one of my bigger naive assumptions was that in early 2007, I figured I’d have maybe a 6 month head start before the rest of the industry began to learn from its initial SharePoint deployment mistakes and start delivering SharePoint “properly.” I thought that I’d better make hay while the sun shines, so to speak, as the market would tighten up as more players entered it.

Yet here we are, heading to the latter half of 2011 – some five years later. As I continue to go into organisations, whether in a SharePoint remedial capacity, or a training/architect capacity, I am still seeing the legacy of really poor SharePoint outcomes. Furthermore I am seeing other, frankly disturbing trends that leave me both concerned and pessimistic. I now have a label for this concern: “SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome.” SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome is hard to define, yet its effects are there for all to see. I suffer from it at times, and I am certain others do too. As an example, recently on the Perth SharePoint User Group on LinkedIn the following topic for discussion was raised:

Hi folks, as you already know we have a worrying skills shortage in SharePoint Development / Architecture in Perth and things are getting worse. It’s getting to the stage where companies have to suspend or worse still abandon their SharePoint projects due to lack of available talent. As the core of the SharePoint community in Perth your suggestions are vital towards finding real solutions to this growing problem. What can be done?

Now I know that this problem is not just limited to Perth. There are consistently reports online that speak of SharePoint people being in demand. So you would think that in a “hot” sector like SharePoint, where the industry is crying out for talent, that the rate of attrition would not outpace the uptake of new talent. After all – money talks, right? If you are a .NET developer with half a brain, there is serious money to be made in SharePoint development land. On top of that, there is the collective realisation in the marketplace that actually talking to people about how SharePoint could make their lives easier, leads to better outcomes. Hence the emergence of this notion of a “SharePoint Architect” with a more varied skill-set that just tech or dev. This role has further been legitimised by entire conferences now just catering to the business this end of the market (I am thinking the Share conferences here).

So, we have all of this newfound collective wisdom spreading through the community via various channels, in terms of the skills and roles required in SharePoint circa 2011 and beyond. We have the fat pay-packets being commanded as a result of demand for these skills. So, with that in mind, why is the attrition rate growing?

As an example, I know personally, several exceptional SharePoint practitioners who are no longer in SharePoint. I’ve also had various quiet conversations with many SharePoint practitioners, right up to SharePoint MCM’s, who vent their various frustrations on how difficult it is to get truly lasting SharePoint solutions in their clients and organisations. I’ve reflected on the various reasons I have come to the conclusion that SharePoint is just plain tiring. As a result, people are burning themselves out.

7 causes of SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome…

Burnout, in case you are not aware, is actually a lack of emotional attachment to what you are doing.  Quoting about.com:

The term “burnout” is a relatively new term, first coined in 1974 by Herbert Freudenberger, in his book, “Burnout: The High Cost of High Achievement.” He originally defined ‘burnout’ as “the extinction of motivation or incentive, especially where one’s devotion to a cause or relationship fails to produce the desired results.

SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome is SharePoint manifested burnout. The symptoms include feeling physically and emotionally drained, difficulty maintaining optimism and energy levels, feeling that you have less to give as the burden of work seems overwhelming. Sound familiar?

So why does SharePoint work run this risk? I see 7 major reasons.

1: Cost pressure leading to overwork

First up, the lure of the big dollar is a double edged sword. Not long ago I shared a beer with a SharePoint developer who’s work I respect greatly, yet I can’t afford to hire. This is because the percentage of chargeable hours he would need to work just so I can break even, is very high. This puts me (the employer) under pressure and at risk. As a result, I need to ensure that my newly minted SharePoint employee is productive from day 1 and I need him to work a lot of hours. But here is the irony. When I had my beer with this developer, the conversation started with him lamenting to me that he is already pulling ridiculous hours (60 to 80 per week). He was looking for a job with less hours and yet more money. This is simply not sustainable, both for employer and employee. The more you chase one (work hours vs. money), the more you lose the other it seems.

2: Structures that force an inappropriate problem solving paradigm (and wicked problems of course)

Then there is the broader problem where structure influences behaviour. As a basic example: from the developers’ perspective, they have to put up with sales guys who promise the world, and project managers who then make their life hell and force them to cut corners delivering the impossible. Project managers find out that their beloved work breakdown structure gets chopped and changed when their pain-in-the-ass developers whine that they can’t make the schedule. As I have stated many times previously, SharePoint project are likely to have wicked problem aspects to them. The structures that work well to deliver tame problems, such as Exchange, a VOIP system or a network upgrade, are much less effective for SharePoint projects. While organisations persist with approaches that consistently fail to deliver good outcomes, and don’t look at the structural issues, the attrition rate will continue. There is only so much that someone can take putting up with these sorts of stresses.

3: Technical complexity

SharePoint’s technical complexity plays a part too. No-one person understands the product in its entirety. The closest person I know is Spence and ages ago on twitter he remarked that even within Microsoft no-one understood it all. As a result, it is simply too easy to make a costly mistake via an untested assumption. (I thought the user profile service was tough – until I did federated claims authentication and multitenancy that is). The utter myriad of features, design options and their even greater number of caveats, mean that one can make a simple design mistake that causes the entire logical edifice of an information architecture to come crashing down. Many have experienced the feeling of having to tell someone that the project time and cost is about to blow out because nobody realised that, say,  Managed Metadata has a bunch of issues that precludes its use in many circumstances. Accordingly, SharePoint architects learn pretty quickly that it is hard to answer a definite “yes” to many questions, because to do so would require a question worded like a contractual clause, to ensure it is framed with appropriate caveats. Even then, consultants would know that lingering feeling in the back of their mind that they might have missed an assumption. This brings me onto…

4: Pace of change

This is BIG…and becoming more acute. Remember the saying ‘The only certainties in life are death and taxes?’ Outside of that, the future is always unpredictable.

In between SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007, the wave of Web 2.0 and social networking broke, forever changing how we collaborate and work with information online (and some of those effects are still to be felt). Microsoft, like any smart organisation, responds to the sentiment of its client base. Microsoft also, like most mature organisations, tends to hedge its bets in terms of marketplace strategy in which it tries to get in on the act with the cool kids, yet tries not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Just look at Windows 8’s new interface, tablets, app stores and the cloud.

But that is one facet. Change happens in many forms and at many scales. For example, at a project level, it may mean a key team member leaves the organisation suddenly (SharePoint fatigue no doubt). At a global and organisational level, events like the odd global financial crisis force organisations to change strategic focus very quickly indeed.

I don’t know about you, but when Windows 8 was announced recently I was not excited (in fact I was not excited by SharePoint 2010 either). I thought to myself “So soon? I am still figuring out the current platform!”

As an example of the effect of pace of change, consider all the Government 2.0 initiatives around the world. Collaboration is in-vogue baby, so information should be free and government agencies should engage with the community. While that’s nice and all, there is the world of compliance, security and records management that takes a very different view. So, we end up with market forces that push against each other in combination with vendors hedging strategy of being all things to all people. It’s little wonder that SharePoint projects become very complex very fast.

By the way, it is worthwhile checking out what Bill Brantley in this post sums up the whole government 2.0 issue when he said:

What exactly is the nature of the Gov 2.0 challenge? This question was inspired by Andrew Krzmarzick’s post (What Gov 2.0 Needs Now: Managers, Money and Models) and Christina Morrison’s post (What is Gov 2.0? A survey of Government IT pros) on the recent GovLoop survey about Gov 2.0. As Andrew and Christina argued, the survey demonstrates many differing perspectives on Gov 2.0 in terms of what it actually means and how to implement Gov 2.0. To me, this suggests that Gov 2.0 is the classic wicked problem

5: SharePoint Entropy

One of my clients (who you will meet in my book when it’s published), once said to me “All good ideas eventually deteriorate into hard work.” This is a nice way to lead into the concept of SharePoint entropy, which in some ways is the inevitable outcome from the first four symptoms. The easiest way to understand entropy is to watch this awesome TV series called the “Wonders of The Universe.” In that show, the concept of entropy was discussed and for me made a lot of intrinsic sense. Without getting into the detail, entropy is the notion that over time things move from an organised to less organised state. Rather than have me waste your time trying to explain it in prose, let’s listen to the show in question. (Don’t skip the video – this is important!)

Now what does this has to do with SharePoint fatigue? Gordon Whyte saw what I am getting at with his post on entropy within organisations, especially in relation to change management.

For example, when we build a car we take raw materials such as metal, leather, plastic and glass and arrange them in a highly organised way to make a car. But if we then leave that car for long enough the metal will rust, the glass will become brittle and break and the leather will dry out and turn to dust. If the car is left for a very long time it will eventually disappear altogether. This thought left me wondering about the nature of organisations. If a progression from order to chaos is the natural order of the universe, then is this same pressure present in organisations and, perhaps more importantly, what is the optimum position for an organisation between the extremes of rigid inflexibility (low entropy) and complete chaos (high entropy)? This question is not as crazy as it might at first appear”

Gordon has nailed the issue in his post. Any SharePoint solution that has a low entropic nature requires more energy and effort to maintain that order and control. Complex SharePoint solutions often have complex governance wrapped around them. Governance that is process and structure centric by definition, has low entropy and accordingly, needs higher effort to maintain over time. In fact, if you do not maintain that effort and energy, then any SharePoint solution will usually disintegrate back into the sort of information management chaos that gave rise to SharePoint in the first place!  Rather like the sandcastle in the video.

By the way, I feel that email and file shares are high entropy solutions – all failed SharePoint projects lead back to these tools because they require less structure to maintain (in the short term).

In short, if SharePoint is implemented with low entropy, more energy is needed to maintain it. Remove the energy and very quickly, things become chaotic again. Governance approaches that are not cognisant of this will never stand the test of time. The question then becomes whether people feel that the end in mind is worth the perceived extra effort that is being asked of them.

6. Social complexity

Social complexity is also somewhat of a result of the first five symptoms. Most organisations have a blame culture. If they didn’t, then people wouldn’t spend so much time trying to position themselves for blame avoidance. Social complexity is the result of turf wars, ideological smackdowns and all of the other sort of things that result in the cliché of “the silos” where people are not talking to each-other in organisations. SharePoint exacerbates social complexity for two main reasons.

Firstly, because it is a collaboration tool, it actually requires some collaboration to put it in! This is often easier said than done. Secondly, because it is a pervasive and disruptive technology, it almost always clashes with an established tool, process or practice where proponents aren’t willing to change. In fact, they may not even recognise that there is a problem to solve – especially when SharePoint has been thrust upon them. (In an old post, I wrote about the notion of memeplexes and the ideological immune mechanisms that they create and why it is so hard to get shared understanding across departmental boundaries in organisations. Memetic smackdowns are the result).

The long and the short of social complexity is that there is only so much stress people can take. We all seem to have a pathological need to seek order and safety, rather then remain in a stressful situation. Once social complexity bites, the merry-go-round of staff attrition really starts to bite…

7. Meaning over motivation…

Now if I haven’t completely depressed you, let me offer you a perverse glimmer of light. For those of us who understand the preceding 6 fatigue symptoms, recognise them for what they are and take steps to mitigating them, there is one other symptom that contributes to SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome. This is the trickiest of all – and I am a somewhat willing victim of it.

I have spent a lot of time learning techniques to help address the symptoms I outlined here and as it turns out, these skills are universally applicable, whether in SharePoint, IT or beyond IT. For years now, I have metaphorically had one foot out of the SharePoint world door and the other foot into the world of construction, health and management sectors. Hell…I have written what I think is the first business book ever by a SharePoint person that is a non SharePoint and non IT. I also have clients with SharePoint deployments who do not know me as a SharePoint person at all, but only as a sensemaker (and for that I am grateful.)

The point is this: While the investment in these skills enables me to counter the effects of SharePoint fatigue syndrome, it is also inexorably pulling me away from SharePoint work. It seems that once you crack this nut a little, your skills are in demand across the entire problem solving spectrum. Right now this is my coping mechanism for SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome – I get to step away from SharePoint for periods and work on something else. Eventually…inevitably…I will also be one of those attrition statistics.

Conclusion:

The problem is that SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome is a negatively reinforcing cycle. As evidenced by the SharePoint attrition rate, money isn’t that great a motivator. If it was, then the void of skilled resources would have been filled by now. Paying more money might give you a short term gain, but in the long term is not going to address my seven causes of SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome.

I will leave this admittedly negative sounding post with the key to breaking this cycle. While you can attend my SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class or Issue Mapping Class to learn many ways, the video below says it all. I encourage you to watch and reflect on it, because it’s the same key point to understanding how to do effective user engagement.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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On the twitterverse recently, someone stated that because of a problem of excessive SharePoint site sprawl, they were going to institute a new site approval process. On the surface this remedy seems to be perfectly reasonable. After all, there is a clear problem that has emerged and in the name of governance, we have taken steps to address it via this new process.

There is only one small problem with this. It’s probably the wrong thing to do or at best, a minor facet of what to do.

Before I explain why, consider another scenario that I am sure all of us have experienced. You have a problem so you call your bank, ISP or some other provider of services that you have paid for. You encounter an operator or customer service representative who seems hell-bent on closing your call at all costs, whether you think the problem is solved or not. Common examples of how this plays out is the oft used “well I will close this call and you can call back and log a new one if there is still an issue” line. A more subtle, yet equally frustrating one that even Microsoft have used on me is the “well you logged the problem as X, but in reality its Y. So you will need to close this call and re-log a new call for problem Y”.

The underlying reason for this is very likely that the performance of the person on the other end of the line is judged on time spent handling your call. The logic would be that the speedier a call is closed, means the less time users have spent on tech support, which indicates good outcomes for customers.

Alas, if only that were true. Anybody who has been on the receiving end of this sort of treatment knows full well that the opposite happens. As a customer, you get frustrated and pissed off. More dangerously for the organization, this sort of indicator conveys a warped representation of reality. Essentially the operator has altered their behaviour to maximise their performance according to this measure of “effectiveness”. Customers who are paying the money are not necessarily satisfied. In fact they are more often than not dissatisfied. Therefore, the notion that length of support calls somehow lead to happier customers is a fallacy. In the longer term, customers will tire of crappy outcomes and take their business elsewhere.

This success indicator is a mirage, and in actual fact contributes to the nastier, longer term problems of customers ending up with competitors.

So with that said, lets go back to our Sharepoint site sprawl issue. Before instituting such a policy, I ask the following simple question.

So why are there lots of sites?

Now there will be various reasons, but the most common answer I get back from this is:

Users don’t know any better.

This assertion is pretty easy to test too. Take a look at the sites in the wild west of a chaotic SharePoint install. Since most site templates in SharePoint have a single document library, it is common to see many hundreds of sites with a single document library in them. Clearly, people simply aren’t aware that they can do things like add more libraries or lists to a site or they are unwilling or unable to do so. I have experienced users telling me that if they had have known, they would have never created a site for a particular collaborative activity.

Side Note: SharePoint’s own attempts to be “intuitive” is the problem here. For a start, sites build navigation by default so people get duped into using sites to create navigational structure when its wholly inappropriate. Secondly, creating a new site is inferred as the right thing to do. To see why, go to the site actions menu and what is a default action there? You guessed it – create a site. SharePoint out of the box actually contributes to users forming this mental model of how SharePoint hangs together).

So clearly, many instances of excess site sprawl is symptomatic of something deeper. Users do not know that there are potentially better alternatives. This leads us to a somewhat rhetorical, yet critical question:

What does an approval process do about users not knowing any better?

Many times such approval processes shift the burden of creating the site to an authorised party like IT, after a requestor’s boss has given it the go ahead. Naturally, people will have to do more paperwork to get approval and it might take longer. Furthermore, maybe their request will be rejected under certain circumstances. But at what point will they learn that there is more to life than sub sites? Even after instituting the approval process, we still may end up with a heap of sites with a single document library in them. Have we really addressed the real issue?

Do you see the parallel? The sort of thinking that decided an approval policy is the answer to site sprawl is the same sort of thinking that decided that call times are a reliable indicator of customer outcomes being met. Both treat the superficial, visible symptoms of a problem, not the underlying cause. Furthermore, both end up leaving stakeholders with crappy outcomes in the longer term. Your support calls are still frustrating and you are still using SharePoint in a sub optimal fashion.

More scarily though is that we have deluded ourselves into thinking we have dealt with the problem. SharePoint governance is often built around this sort of superficial thinking. If a governance plan weighs as much as a door stop, and gets about as much attention as a door stop, then you might be making this mistake.

What about legacy?

This problem is more common than you think. There is a more systematic pattern of delusion that can happen in project management. Check out the diagram below.

Seen this diagram before? It is very common on project management books and presentations. We have a pyramid that implying that to have quality, we have to have time, cost and scope balanced and understood. Like the site approval policy, this seems perfectly reasonable on the surface. But unfortunately, by its very nature can cloud us to what is really important.

Below is an example of a project output – the Sydney Opera House. During my classes, everyone recognises it and there is always someone who has been there. In fact people come to Sydney just to see it. In term of economic significance to Sydney, it is priceless and irreplaceable. the architect who designed it, Jørn Utzon, was awarded the Pritzker Prize (architecture’s highest honour) for it in 2003.

So I ask you the question:

Was this a successful project?

I ask this question to people all around the world and the answer is always a great big Yes. But if we look at this project through the lens of our quality triangle above, the view changes.

Why?

Well, here are a few fun filled facts about the Sydney Opera House.

• The Opera House was formally completed in 1973, having cost $102 million.
• The original cost estimate in 1957 was $7 million.
• The original completion date set by the government was 1963.
• Thus, the project was completed ten years late and over-budget by more than fourteen times.
• Ultzon, the designer of the opera house never lived to set foot in it, having left Australia in disgust, swearing never to come back.

“Utzon soon found himself in conflict with the new Minister. Attempting to rein in the escalating cost of the project, Hughes began questioning Utzon’s capability, his designs, schedules and cost estimates. Hughes eventually stopped payments to Utzon. Unable to pay his staff, Utzon was forced to resign as chief architect in February 1966 and left the country never to return. Utzon has never seen the completed work that brought him international renown”

Harsh huh? Clearly, when judged through the “quality” lens of time, cost and scope, this project was a unmitigated epic fail that makes SharePoint look like a walk in the park.

The example of the Sydney Opera House serves to remind us that when all is said and done, we judge quality across something deeper than time, cost and scope alone. That something is legacy.

People remember legacy, not scope

So when you look at the Opera house through the lens of the quality triangle, you are making the same mistake as the call-center KPI and the well intentioned site creation policy. You are taking a superficial view of things and in doing so, missing more subtle, but ultimately important factors. In fact you are treating symptoms and not looking for the “story beneath the story” that caused the visible symptoms in the first place.

Yet…

Why do we go to the time, effort and cost to put in tools like SharePoint? It is because we see that it can take us to a better place than we are now. After all, if we didn’t believe this fundamental truth, then we wouldn’t spend the that time and money working on it. This notion of a “better place” implies that we are trying to escape a legacy of the past – such as poor information management practices, inefficient process, silo organisations and so forth.

As illustrated by the Opera House example, people do not remember time, cost and scope. What they do remember acutely however is legacy.

So what is a more reliable indicator of quality? Who visits the Opera house and takes a photo of it because it was such a breathtakingly bad example of project management 101? No, they take their photo because it is unique, has value and people want to experience it for themselves. Its the legacy that they remember, cherish and want to be a part of.

As a result, there is a critical lesson here for all SharePoint practitioners (from the nerdiest of nerds to the hippiest of web 2.0 pundits). Ask yourself, “what legacy is my governance actions going to leave”, because if you fail to consider the legacy of your approaches to SharePoint delivery, you are probably dooming your organisation to the very same legacy you wanted to escape in the first place!

And that’s just tragic.

So I think that PM 101 diagram needs to be redrawn because it misleads – especially for complex, adaptive or wicked problems. To me, considering time, cost and scope without legacy is delusional and plain dumb. Legacy informs time, cost and scope and challenges us to look beyond the visible symptoms of what we perceive as the problem to what’s really going on.

When I get time, I will post several examples of how I was able to utilise this sort of thinking in a future post, but I hope this gives you some food for thought.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.spgovia.com

                      

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For one night only USA…

Ah, Erica Toelle – what a legend! Thanks to Erica and Fpweb, I’m thrilled to confirm that the Seattle SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class is all systems go. Save the date as its very likely indeed to be the only SPIA class in the USA in 2011.  If it wasn’t enough that Erica will be joining me, but Ruven Gotz will be there too.

Thursday and Friday, May 05-06, 2011. (http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/)

The location is the Silvercloud Inn, 14632 SE Eastgate Way Bellevue, WA 98004

In this multimedia extravaganza of a blog post, lets take a closer look at this class and what you can expect. Below is a snippet of a talk I did in New Zealand called “SharePoint Governance  Home Truths”. This clip shows a little diagnostic test that I do on my audience, to see whether they have experienced the visible signs of wicked problems. If you want to know why you should go to SPGov+IA, then take my 2 minute test yourself.

If the two minute test has taken your fancy, then you might want to see what is in store on the course itself. Below is the first half-hour of module 1 (in the form of a conference session), as well as the accompanying slide deck.

Course Information:

Download Course Outline (PDF)

Download Class Flyer (PDF)

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed.  Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock-solid, stable, well-documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success.  Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This Master Class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot.  Paul Culmsee’s style takes an ironic and subversive view on how SharePoint Governance really works within organizations while presenting a model and the tools necessary to get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul Culmsee has distilled the "what" and "how" of governance down to a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organizations, large and small, can utilize to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become a successful part of your enterprise.

Some workshop sessions are hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Course Structure:

The course is split into 7 modules, run across two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

Attendees will be taking home a manual ~480 pages, containing the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit CD with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement "out in the field" by Paul Culmsee and have only been recently released to the public through this Master Class.

More Information:

• Praise for SharePoint Governance and IA Masterclass

Refund Policy:

No refunds will be issued for attendee cancellations once payment is recieved.  Class cancellation by the organizer will result in a refund less transaction fees.

http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/

                      

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• The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
• The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
• The facets of collaboration Part 3-The feature jigsaw
• The facets of collaboration Part 4 – BPM vs. HPM

Hi all

Welcome to another exploration of the collaborative world through a lens called the facets of collaboration. If you are joining us for the first time, I am writing a series of posts that looks at how our perception of collaboration influences our penchant for certain collaborative tools and approaches. SharePoint, given that it is touted as a collaboration platform, inevitably results in consultants never being able to give a straight answer. This is because SharePoint is so feature-rich (and as a result caveat-rich), that there are always fifty different ways a situation can be approached. Add the fact that many clients do not necessarily know what they want and learn about their problem by examining potential solutions, we have all the hallmarks of a wicked problem in the making.

These wicked problems, underpinning SharePoint, often results in Robot Barbie situations (cue the image to the left), which is the metaphor that I started this series with. Robot Barbie represents everything wrong about SharePoint deployments, as it is symptomatic of throwing features at a platitude, pretending to be solving a real problem and then wondering why the result doesn’t gel at all. It is a pattern of behaviour that is similar to an observation made by the very wise (and profane) Ted Dziuba who once spoke these words of wisdom.

If there’s one thing all engineers love to do, it’s create APIs. It’s so awesome because you can draw on a white board and feel like you put in a good day’s work, despite having solved no real, actual problems. Web 2.0 engineers, in addition to their intrinsic love of APIs, have a real hard-on for anything having to do with a social network. For example, developing a Facebook application lets them call their shitty little PHP program an "application" running on a "platform," like a real, live computer programmer does. Make-believe time is so much fun, even for adults.

Apart from making me giggle, Dziuba may have a point. Elsewhere on this blog I have spent time explaining that there are different types of problems that require different approaches to solving them (wicked vs. tame). My conjecture is that collaboration itself is exactly the same in this regard. People who espouse a particular type of tool or approach as the utopian solution to collaboration are taking a one size fits all approach to a multifaceted area and even worse, treating that area as a platitude. Anyone who calls themselves an Information Architect and doesn’t at least give cursory examination to the dimensions or facets of collaboration is likely to be doing their stakeholders a disservice.

All of us have certain biases, and I am no exception. For a start, I am generation X – the so-called cynical generation. Apparently we whinge and whine about everything and then blame it all on generation-Y. Thus, if cynicism is the gen-X stereotype, then I will happily accept being the poster child. I mean seriously, all of you vanity obsessed, self interested generation y’ers, if you spend a little less time preening and more time thinking, we might get some wisdom out of you (see – I am such a cynical gen-X right now).

So let’s recap the facets of collaboration. The model I came up with identifies four major facets for collaborative work: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

• Task: Because the outcome drives the members’ attention and participation
• Trait: Because the interest drives the members’ attention and participation
• Transactional: Because the process drives the members’ attention and participation
• Social: Because the shared insight drives the members’ attention and participation

In the last post, I used the model to examine the notion of Business Process Management versus Human Process Management and looked at some of the claims and counter claims made by proponents of each. This time let’s up the ante and talk about something curlier. We will examine the notion that social networking in the enterprise is the answer to improving collaboration within the enterprise. On first thought, it makes perfect sense, given the incredible success of Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Nevertheless, there is ongoing debate about the use and value of social tools in the enterprise driven by their rise outside of organisational contexts. One particularly strongly worded quote is from Aaron Fulkerson, co-founder and CEO of MindTouch who doesn’t mince his words:

This class of software forces business users to adopt the myopic social visions imagined by the developers, which are nearly identical to their corresponding consumer web implementations. In short, social software is not solving business problems. In fact, these applications only serve to treat symptoms of the problems businesses face. They exacerbate the real problems within businesses by creating distractions and, worse, proliferate more disconnected data and application silos.

Ouch! Even within the SharePoint community there is significant variation of opinions as to the value of social. While I better protect the innocent and not name names, I have spoken with several well known SharePointers who think social is a giant waste of time, versus those who see real value in it. Irrespective of your opinion, you cannot ignore the fact that social is a significant game changer with effects still being felt. While web 2.0 has dropped off the Gartner hype cycle, its effect on particular sectors has been far reaching. Now it seems that all sectors have a 2.0 on the end of their name. For example:

• Enterprise 2.0
• Education 2.0
• Legal 2.0
• Government 2.0

Clearly, if things were just a flash in the pan, why are governments around the world trying to revitalise their public sector by utilising these tools?

Look at Microsoft as another example. They have, I think smartly, recognised industry trends and reacted to them via the introduction of a number of new SharePoint features, such as tagging/folksonomy via managed metadata, ratings columns, enhanced wiki capabilities and a significant investment in the capabilities of my-sites. Their clients now have the option to leverage these features should they choose to do so.

So just as there are naysayers, there are the pundits. Many people cite the reasoning that these features are necessary to attract and retain the next generation of workers, who have grown up with these tools in their personal lives. Whether this claim is valid is debatable, but I have to say, I really like the Enterprise 2.0 slide deck below by Scott Gavin for a number of reasons. I think it encapsulates the 2.0 vision, underpinned by social/cloud technologies very nicely. I sometimes ask people to discuss this slide deck in my IA classes and discussion is equally polarising as social networking in the enterprise itself. Some people think it represents the vision for the future, and others think it is hopelessly idealistic and doesn’t reflect cold, hard reality. Take a look for yourself below…

And the survey says…

Using the facets quadrants, we can start to see patterns for success of these tools for the enterprise and whether Aaron Fulkerson’s argument has merit or whether Scott Gavin is on the right track. An interesting use of the facet diagram is to plot where various tools and technologies are located. in my classes, I ask people to plot where Facebook belongs on facets diagram. Guess where it is usually drawn? 

While some people will draw Facebook at various levels on the vertical axis, everyone pretty much describes Facebook (and LinkedIn)  as trait based, while being highly dominant on the social quadrant. As discussed in the last article, if I ask people to plot a crowdsourced tool like Wikipedia, the dominant characteristic is always trait/social. In other words, people maintain and update Wikipedia articles because of their interest in the topic area, not because it helps them get something done.

Clearly, big social networking technologies are successful in the "trait based social” quadrant. In other words, we tend to use Facebook more for common interest collaboration than to solve a task based collaborative issue (such as deliver a project). Another interesting thing about a lot of social networking technologies is that for many, our work-based collaborative life tends to be more task based, compared to our non-work which is more trait based. In other words, for a lot of us, our work life revolves around working with a group of people for a common outcome and if it was not for that common outcome, we wouldn’t necessarily have much in common (I risk falling victim to my own generalisation here – so I will come back to this later in the section titled “Why User Buy-In Is Hard”).

When you look at where Facebook sits in the quadrant, it begs the question of how well this type of tool (or the building blocks it is based on) would work in an organisation that is project (task) based and highly transactional. To that end, consider a project management information system, such as the basic one that Dux espouses in his book or the more complex one that Microsoft sell to organisations. Where do you think it belongs on the quadrant?

When I ask people to plot their project management information system, I typically get this response:

I speculate that the further away two tools lie on the spectrum, the more likely we are to have a robot-barbie solution if you blindly mix features that work well in each individual quadrant. The wiki argument I made in part 3 seems to support this contention. If you recall, in part 3 of this series, I mentioned that I ask every attendee of my classes if they had ever seen a successful project management wiki.  Irrespective of the location of the class, the answer was pretty much “no”. I noted that where I had seen successful wikis tended to be where the users of the wiki were linked by strong traits.

Looking Deeper

While that is interesting, I think the facets diagram tells you more than it intends. Obviously, it is clear that these project management systems such as MS Project Server are oriented toward task/transactional (“getting things done”) aspect of project delivery (ie, time, cost, scope, budget and the like). While some people might point to this and say “there you go – I told you all that social crap was a waste of time – bloody gen-Y and their social networking hubris”, I feel this is naive. If task based transactional tools are sufficient, then why do so many projects fail?

I have stated many times on this blog that shared commitment to a course of action requires shared understanding of the problem at hand. The act of aligning a team to project goals and developing this shared understanding is the realm of the task/social quadrant (the top left), where insights and outcomes come together. When I ask people to name tools that live in this space, few can name anything. Obviously, most project management systems are devoid here. Worst still, we subsequently delude ourselves to thinking that shared understanding can come from a few platitudinal paragraphs labelled as a “problem statement”.

Social networking pundits implicitly recognise this issue (and frequently butt heads against command and control type project managers as a result). But i feel they make the mistake in applying a one size fits all approach to collaboration and apply trait based tools as a panacea when they are not wholly appropriate. The social tools seem to fit exceptionally well into the top right quadrant, but not in the top left.

In fact the only tools that spring to mind that belong in the top left category are the sensemaking tools that my company practice, such as Dialogue Mapping.

Where’s the proof, Paul?

So I guess I am arguing that using social tools because they are the “choice of the new generation” ignores a few home truths about the nature of these tools versus the nature of organisational life. Just because Microsoft provide the tools for you, tells you that they are hedging their bets rather than having any more insight than you or me. So to test all of this, let’s use the facets model in a different way to back up some of my observations and suggestions in this post. Guess what happens when I ask people to plot SharePoint itself on the facets map?

When I asked SharePoint practitioners to do this, they initially drew SharePoint 2007 as a circle over the entire model. Once they did so, they would very often adjust the drawing to emphasise transactional over social collaboration as shown below.

When practitioners were asked to draw SharePoint 2010, they usually indicated a higher representation in in the two social quadrants, but favoured the trait based social over task based social as shown below.

What was interesting about this experiment is that very few people drew SharePoint over the entire facets of collaboration. Social collaboration with SharePoint it seems, only stretches so far. This leads me onto more conjecture, and now we get to the bit in the post where we name a giant SharePoint elephant in the room.

Structured tools for social collaboration?

Many collaborative tools purport themselves as operating in the social space. SharePoint 2010 clearly does so, principally due to the Managed Metadata service, pimped MySites with tagging/rating capabilities. But SharePoint’s core heritage is database/metadata driven, document based collaboration. If we go back to our definition of social collaboration as dynamic, unstructured, with sharing of perspectives and insight through pattern sensing, then social collaboration is clearly not a predefined interaction.

Yet, database driven tools like SharePoint, and its building blocks like site columns and content types require considerable up-front planning to install and govern. Many, many inputs need to be well defined and furthermore, unless you have learnt through living the pain of things like content type definitions in declarative CAML, SharePoint buildings blocks are difficult to maintain/change over time. SharePoint suffers from a problem of reduced resiliency over time in that the more you customise it to suit your ends, the less flexible it gets. In the case of social collaboration the problem is worse because we are trying design for outputs where the inputs are not controlled. Trying to turn something that is inherently organic and emergent to something that has an X and Y on it may be misfocused and destined to fail in many circumstances. The realm of well-defined inputs is the realm of transactional collaboration, where workflow and business process management thrive and change is much more controlled before SharePoint ever gets a look in.

SharePoint excels at transactional scenarios as this is its heritage – after all, the majority of its feature set is oriented to transactional collaboration. The fact that people are prepared to draw SharePoint as dominating across across the transactional half of the facets diagram illustrates this.

But this raises interesting, if not slightly heretical question. If we need to use information architects to get a collaborative tool deployed for social collaboration (to get those inputs defined), then are we pushing the solution into the transactional side of the fence? Recall that in part 3 of this series, I looked at document collaboration and noted that when asked to draw team based document collaboration, people typically drew it operating in the social half of the matrix (pasted below for reference). I also noted in part 3 that for team based collaboration, rules and process are much less rigid or formalised with regards to document use and structure. I then referred to a recent NothingbutSharePoint article where a large organisation’s attempts to introduce the usage of content types largely failed. Like the seeming lack of success of wiki’s for task based collaboration, maybe content types simply are not the ideal construct as you move up the Y axis from transactional to social?

Now do not assume that I am anti metadata/content types here as this is not the case at all. Content types rock when it comes to search and surfacing of related information across a site collection (and beyond if you use search web parts). What I am calling out is the fact that if the SharePoint constructs that we have at our disposal were the panacea for social collaboration, where are the best practices that tell us how to leverage them for success? Perhaps the nature of the collaboration taking place plays a part in the lack of take-up reported in the aforementioned article? Those who advocate highly structured metadata as the only true solution may in fact be pushing a transactional paradigm onto a collaborative model that is ill-suited to it?

The knowledge worker paradox – one of the reasons why user buy-in is hard

Finally for now I’d like to cover one more aspect to this issue. Last year, one of my students looked at the facets and said “Now I know why my users aren’t seeing the value that I see in SharePoint”. When I asked him why, he explained:

“Many of my users are transactional and governed by process – that’s their KPI. Here I am as a knowledge worker, seeing all of these great collaborative features, but I am not judged by a process or transaction. I don’t live in that world. I forget that someone whose performance is judged by process consistency is not going to get all excited by a wiki or tagging or a blog.”

I call this the knowledge worker paradox and it is reminiscent of what I said in part 4 where we looked at BPM vs. HPM. Each role on an organisation is multifaceted. For many roles, there is varying degrees of transactional work taking place. Accordingly some people are very much process driven just as much as they are social driven. Gross generalisations that make statements that “80% of people are knowledge workers or perform knowledge work” do not help matters. In fact they serve to feed the one size fits all mentality that has proven to be detrimental to projects when people fail to recognise that some projects have wicked aspects.

SharePoint people are almost always knowledge workers. Thus if you, as a knowledge worker who is rarely governed by transactional process, think that you have the vision to prescribe a SharePoint driven meta-utopia to meet transactional needs without having lived that world, then if your results are not what you hoped for then to me its hardly surprising.  My student in this case realised that he had been approaching his user base the wrong way. Like Jane in part 1, he did not take into account the dominant facets of collaboration for the roles that he was trying to sell SharePoint into.

When you think about it, the whole argument around records management versus collaborative document management is in effect, an argument between a transactional oriented approach, versus a social oriented one. It is the same pattern as BPM vs. HPM. In records management, the paradigm is that management of the record is more important than the content of the record. Furthermore, that record shouldn’t change. Yet with team based document collaboration, without content there is no document as such and furthermore, the document will change frequently and require less strict controls to grease the gears of collaboration.

Both records oriented people and social pundits commonly make the same mistake of my student, where they force their dominant paradigm on everyone else.

Conclusion

Food for thought, eh?

This is probably my last facets of collaboration post for a while. It is one of these series of articles that I feel has value, but I know it won’t be read by too many Nevertheless, I do hope that anyone who has gotten this far through has gotten some value from this examination and sees value in the model to help users make more informed Information Architecture decisions for SharePoint and beyond. I certainly use it now in most engagements and hope that it can be improved upon as a tool, or somehow incorporated into some of the SharePoint standards or maturity model stuff that is out there.

Remember the most important thing of all though. Despite all I have said, it is still definitely all generation y’s fault!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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