This is the first article in a short series that will be looking at factors causing the sort of communication problems that underpin the motivation to implement a product like SharePoint. When you think about why you want to implement SharePoint, it tends to boil down to an improvement in efficiency brought about by improved collaboration between individuals or teams.

Improved or more effective collaboration is a great idea in theory but unfortunately SharePoint’s implementations have been hit or miss affairs. When a SharePoint project goes well, it tends to go very well. When it goes bad, it tends to be very bad. I’ve seen both extremes. On one of my projects I had the executive chairman so enamoured with a particular requirement being satisfied that he was out there evangelising to the user base for me. Once this happens, success is generally assured. But on the other hand, I have been called out to sites where they have completely lost control of it all, and to even mention the dreaded "S" word will result in you being ostracised.

I realised long ago that to put in SharePoint without considering and understanding the various root causes to "communication problems" is to be unconsciously incompetent. (By the way, if you have not read my "Thinking SharePoint" series, "unconsciously incompetent" is a term used in education/training disciplines to indicate that "you do not know what you do not know". In other words, how can you be trained on something when you do not even acknowledge that you have a deficiency in that area?

Training, therefore, is most effective when trainees are at the "consciously incompetent" stage of their learning. This means that they now realise and understand that they have deficiencies in a knowledge area and seek to improve their skill. Some might argue that to actually put SharePoint into an organisation is to be consciously incompetent, because you have recognised the inefficiency in existing communication and collaboration. I believe this is deluded because all you are doing is trying to deal with the visible effects of communication fragmentation. You still do not necessarily have a full understanding of the root causes of that fragmentation.

I’m sure that many of you have watched the TV series House. How many times do they just about kill the patient with a treatment for an incorrect diagnosis? Unlike Dr House, though, SharePoint consultants don’t often get that convenient epiphany at the 38 minute mark of an episode that nails the root cause, applying the correct treatment and saving the patient.

Therefore, I have decided to call this series "Root causes of communication fragmentation". This first article is essentially the same as one called Learning styles, behavioural styles and “collaboration” that I published it over at endusersharepoint.com.

Honey and Mumford Learning Styles

When I was taking my "Train the trainer" course at the Australian Institute of Management, we participated in an experiment. We answered a questionnaire and based on our answers were separated into four groups.

It turned out that these groups were separated based on our most dominant Honey and Mumford learning style.

For those of you who are not aware, according to this work, there are four types of learners. I have listed them below, and for your reference I was classed as a theorist/pragmatist with more of a pragmatic leaning. Funnily enough when I was younger I was definitely an activist learner but as I have aged I moved down the list!

Activitists (Do)

• Immerse themselves fully in new experiences
• Enjoy here and now
• Open minded, enthusiastic, flexible
• Act first, consider consequences later
• Seek to centre activity around themselves

Reflectors (Review)

• Stand back and observe
• Cautious, take a back seat
• Collect and analyze data about experience and events, slow to reach conclusions
• Use information from past, present and immediate observations to maintain a big picture perspective.

Theorists (Conclude)

• Think through problems in a logical manner, value rationality and objectivity
• Assimilate disparate facts into coherent theories
• Disciplined, aiming to fit things into rational order
• Keen on basic assumptions, principles, theories, models and systems thinking

Pragmatists (Plan)

• Keen to put ideas, theories and techniques into practice
• Search new ideas and experiment
• Act quickly and confidently on ideas, gets straight to the point
• Are impatient with endless discussion

In this experiment, each of the four groups were given the same fictitious problem. We were asked to write a plan for how we would go about solving it. We spent then 30 minutes on this in groups before reassembling back in the same room where the groups compared notes.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, we all thought that the other groups were complete idiots. The reflectors in particular thought that the activists represented complete anarchy and chaos. My group – the pragmatists (who of course have it right), knew that their method was by far the best one and had no time at all for reflectors who perform all of that analysis-paralysis. Mind you, we did have some sympathy for the theorists 🙂 .

Why is communication, shared understanding, knowledge management and collaboration such a difficult thing to do?  This is one of the root causes. This experiment really hit home to me, just how incredibly different people are and how a collaborative tool by definition, needs to be designed or implemented in such a way that all participants use, believe and evangelise it. But since they all have different styles of learning, accommodating them all without alienating some is a pretty difficult task.

DISC

Then we have behavioural theory with Marston DISC. This test is used in recruitment and HR often to see how well a candidate will ‘fit’ into the cohesiveness of a group or organisation. DISC is an acronym that relates to four ‘dimensions’ of personality traits.

• Dominance – relating to control, power and assertiveness
• Influence – relating to social situations and communication
• Steadiness – relating to patience, persistence, and thoughtfulness
• Conscientiousness – relating to structure and organization

Below is the explanation of each trait from wikipedia. Is it any surprise that senior managers tend to be dominant in "D", sales and marketing people dominant "I" while engineers are dominant "C"?

• Dominance: People who score high in the intensity of the ‘D’ styles factor are very active in dealing with problems and challenges, while low D scores are people who want to do more research before committing to a decision. High "D" people are described as demanding, forceful, egocentric, strong willed, driving, determined, ambitious, aggressive, and pioneering. Low D scores describe those who are conservative, low keyed, cooperative, calculating, undemanding, cautious, mild, agreeable, modest and peaceful.
• Influence: People with High I scores influence others through talking and activity and tend to be emotional. They are described as convincing, magnetic, political, enthusiastic, persuasive, warm, demonstrative, trusting, and optimistic. Those with Low I scores influence more by data and facts, and not with feelings. They are described as reflective, factual, calculating, skeptical, logical, suspicious, matter of fact, pessimistic, and critical.
• Steadiness: People with High S styles scores want a steady pace, security, and do not like sudden change. Low S intensity scores are those who like change and variety. High S persons are calm, relaxed, patient, possessive, predictable, deliberate, stable, consistent, and tend to be unemotional and poker faced. People with Low S scores are described as restless, demonstrative, impatient, eager, or even impulsive.
• Conscientious: Persons with High C styles adhere to rules, regulations, and structure. They like to do quality work and do it right the first time. High C people are careful, cautious, exacting, neat, systematic, diplomatic, accurate, tactful. Those with Low C scores challenge the rules and want independence and are described as self-willed, stubborn, opinionated, unsystematic, arbitrary, and careless with details.

Don Bowlby has a nice post where he illustrates these different behavioural styles with examples of "Dominant Dave", "Influential Ingrid", "Steady Stan" and "Conscientious Catherine". Do take the time to read his post, and then see which of these people you relate to the most.

Note: You can have elements of more than one of the DISC dimensions but you tend to be dominate in one of them.

Dominant Dave questions the status quo, is quick to make decisions/solve problems. He has no problem with power and authority, loves autonomy and working on lots of stuff. He struggles to relate to some people and sometimes has trouble identifying with the group. People like Dave get things moving forward, but can overlook detail in the process.

Influential Ingrid always wants to make a good impression, loves people and prefers to talk about her ideas rather than present them in writing. She doesn’t like a lot of details and can appear disorganized. Being so emotionally oriented, she can have trouble making objective evaluations of people and situations. People like Ingrid foster open communication and strive for an enjoyable experience. But Ingrid needs people who enjoy routines and tasks because these things make her uncomfortable.

Steady Stan is patient, helpful and finishes everything he starts. Stan’s daily routine rarely changes and he does not react well if it suddenly does. Without people like Stan, things would never get finished, yet the rigidity of Stan’s routine can frustrate when quick decisions and action are needed.

Conscientious Catherine is even more anal-retentive than Steady Stan. She is very analytical, applies critical thinking and likes to know what the goals are and what is expected and is always happy to lend her expertise when required. Sometimes Catherine’s detail oriented nature can slow projects down and her application of critical thinking may seem negative at times. She has a knack for pointing out everything that can go wrong with a project, product or venture.

Hmm, I just read a book on analytics and wrote a series of posts on SharePoint project failure and ROI – but I am as messy as hell so which domain am I? 😉

How would SharePoint look?

Let’s try a little experiment. Below I theorise what a SharePoint portal would look like, based on the presumption that each of our 4 people above assumed full creative control over development and direction. Feel free to comment to the accuracy (or not) of my guesses.

Dominant Dave has seen SharePoint, liked it and thrown together a SharePoint site. He has set up sites, wiki’s, blogs, lists, libraries and on top of that, relentlessly downloaded every possible add-on, and tried it out, using some and giving up on others (but never uninstalled). His idea of a communications plan and training is to send out an email with the new URL and instruct people to start using it. The site is full of evidence of half-starts and unfinished ideas and no-one really knows exactly what the goal of it all is. But that’s okay, Dave has by now passed it onto Steady Stan to finish it off anyway.

Influential Ingrid on the other hand, engages a graphic design company to work on the look of the site. She will come up with a catchy acronym for the project, and organise t-shirts and mouse-mats to be printed and distributed to staff. The site is launched with great fanfare, yet practically devoid of content except for the social club site and the "about us" section. Document libraries and lists are unlikely to have much attention, because all the emphasis is on the static web content side of things. Despite the lack of use of many of the built-in collaborative tools, boy-oh-boy, does that home page look cool! Things will flash, sparkle and dazzle more than a drag queen singing at a cabaret.

Steady Stan will quickly see the potential for improving the way that content can be better organised, searched and managed. Thus he will spend his time coming up with a common structure for all aspects of the portal no matter which site is visited. The document libraries, list and other content areas will be consistent and identical and templated for re-use. Branding will be ignored, because it is not as important as consistency. He will roll it out, expecting people to naturally take it up, seeing the value created.

Conscientious Catherine will first undertake a 6 month feasibility study into the portal that costs more money than what Dominant Dave took for his entire SharePoint project. The outcome of this study would be to learn what people want out of the portal. She works out a methodology to gather requirements, but on execution it becomes obvious that both Dave and Ingrid haven’t got a clue as they can’t seem to offer a straight answer when she asks what they want. "How can I deliver you a portal when I don’t know your requirements?", Catherine asks in indignation. In the end, Dominant Dave looks at how much money has been spent for no obvious gain and kills the project.

The Honey DISC soup

The point of my little exercise with sweeping generalisation is that "collaboration" by definition is about working together to achieve a common goal or outcome. Unfortunately, it is clear that our 4 characters above have very different motivations and interpretations of what that outcome is.

In my consulting life, where I spend a lot of time doing requirements work, training or project management, I have gotten to the point where I can pick someone’s personality/learning style out. Also, once you start to get a feel for this, you realise that a lot of root causes in social fragmentation is simply a lack of awareness of how people speak to each other.

When you combine DISC and learning styles, it gives you a pretty good appreciation of social complexity. Given a complex problem, you will always get people who want to jump straight in (activists), those who want to consider all of the issues (reflectors), theorists who will be looking for best-practice guidelines and us pragmatists who say the rest are right so long as it is done *our* way.

But when you add the dimension of DISC, the forces of social fragmentation get even stronger. Consider the case of a "Dominant Activist". Here is someone who is forceful, strong willed, potentially intimidating yet wants to dive headlong into a solution. These guys are hazardous to your health because they usually have the power to do it their way regardless.

On the other extreme you have a "Conscientious Reflector". There is every dodgy middle manger that I have worked with right there!

Another classic example is the "Steady Theorist" who believe that rigidly following a methodology is the answer to the world’s problems, no matter what. I have met a few ITIL people who I would lump in this bucket 🙂 .

Communication Fragmentation

Meetings are the place where fragmentation strikes and miscommunication arises as a result. For example, in a strategy meeting, the reflector is the one who *always* challenges the frame of the meeting and annoys everybody else in the process. The activists are annoyed that they had to go to the meeting in the first place, and the theorists are trying to convince everyone that [insert methodology here] is the way to go.

A dominant "D" type personality often speaks in a very direct manner. To a low D type personality, this can be seen as intimidating, rude or arrogant. D and S type personalities can really struggle to get along, because at times, they are polar opposites in what motivates them and keeps them interested.

A heavy "D" personality who is a pragmatic learner is probably going to be a handful when it comes to, say, working on functional requirements with an "S" type application developer who happens to be a theorist learner.

Is it any wonder people consider meetings to be inefficient, a waste of time and not achieving much!

The point is that usually people forget that not everybody shares their behaviour and learning styles.

Collaboration Fragmentation and Information Architecture

So since meetings are inefficient and suck so much, we look to other methods to collaborate to achieve our goals. But that communication gap that can exist between people of differing learning styles and personality types reflects itself in collaborative tools as well. An IT Manager who, for example, is mainly a "S" type personality is going to put together a SharePoint solution with a very different emphasis than, say, someone who is mainly a Dominant Activist.

Of course, organisational type and culture, regional culture, geography, age, gender and other biases play large factors as well. Organisational considerations has gained some attention – one of the best examples I saw being the great paper by Michael Earl who in 2001 wrote "Knowledge Management Strategies – Toward a taxonomy". But unfortunately, no academic has ever performed an empirical study that looks at whether there is a correlation between behaviour/learning styles and the sort of collaborative tools/techniques that people gravitate to. I think if such a study was undertaken, it would offer some extremely valuable insights into how to go about delivering a collaborative solution for particular groups, individuals or organisations.

So, when you are designing your "work of art" Information Architecture that has taken weeks to work out, ask yourself this question: Is this a work of art for me or for the people who will be collaborating via it?

The great irony in all of this is that the only way to remove some of the barriers of social fragmentation is to collaborate. In the case of SharePoint, you need to collaborate, to put in a collaborative platform. Am I the only one who finds that perversely funny? 🙂

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Oh how times change! I am reading a good book at the moment called "Competing on Analytics – The New Science of Winning" and I hit one particular quote that I have to share with you. It’s one of those statements that makes perfect sense at the time, but is kind of funny when you look at it in the context of recent world events in the financial markets.

…But in other cases, analytics can permanently transform an industry or process. As Money-ball and Liar’s Poker author Michael Lewis points out in talking about investment banking. "the introduction of derivatives and other new financial instruments brought unprecedented levels of complexity and variation to investment firms. The old-school, instinct guys who knew when to buy and when to sell were watching young MBA’s – or worse, PhD’s from MIT – bring an unprecedented level of analysis and brain power to trading. Within 10 years the old guard was gone".

I love that line "analysis and brain power", given the contribution of derivatives to the prospect of a "teensy weensy" global recession. Mind you, how much ‘analytics’ do you think is going into current decisions and company valuations on the stock market?

Where are those old school guys? I want ’em back!! 🙂

I don’t know if you have ever read ISO9001, but it is about as exciting as getting a root canal or trying to listen to a Ricky Martin album with a straight face. But hey, if they were actually interesting, ISO compliance wouldn’t be such a billion dollar industry. Does anybody else use SharePoint for ISO compliance purposes? I’ve done several of them now.

First up, I’ll give you the Cleverworkarounds’ version of ISO9001 and then I’ll teach you how to use it to get your own way 🙂 .

ISO9001 is an internationally recognised standard that provides an organisation with the guiding principles, means and methods to improve their internal quality. If you are wondering what or which quality, then I can’t give you an answer because it depends on your organisation. So for example, Microsoft might use ISO9001 to improve their ability to release a desktop operating system that people actually like. McDonalds may use ISO9001 to ensure that your calorie-laden burger is *consistently* calorie-laden no matter which store you visit.

Continue reading “(ab)using ISO9001 for fun and profit”

This project was not SharePoint, but I have seen some people try and do this with SharePoint. But you can imagine how much stress this project would have caused to participants.

The South Australian government has pulled the plug on its $5 million records management system project, ending a five-year saga plagued by repeated cost blowouts, delays and confusion

http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,24510560-15306,00.html

I can’t help but feel that if this particularly wise and insightful document written by their federal government counterparts had been written a couple of years earlier, some of sting just might have been taken out of this example of expensive project failure.

Many of the most pressing policy challenges for the APS involve dealing with very complex problems. These problems share a range of characteristics—they go beyond the capacity of any one organisation to understand and respond to, and there is often disagreement about the causes of the problems and the best way to tackle them. These complex policy problems are sometimes called ‘wicked’ problems

Critically, tackling wicked problems also calls for high levels of systems thinking. This big picture thinking helps policy makers to make the connections between the multiple causes and interdependencies of wicked problems that are necessary in order to avoid a narrow approach and the artificial taming of wicked problems

Read the full document here:

http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications07/wickedproblems.htm

Here we go… another Cleverworkarounds waffle!

Now, we all know that Joel Oleson is the Russell Crowe of the SharePoint world! I mean, he’s multi-skilled, loads of talent, has the respect of his peers and has built a well deserved reputation of being one of the best at what he does. (Although unlike Russell I am fairly sure that he has not thrown a telephone at an annoying IT manager in a fit of rage just yet).

But despite his best intentions and with his heart in the right place, Joel is one of the unwitting architects of a butterfly effect that is now plaguing the SharePoint world. One that is now causing much pain and damage to already beleaguered enterprises.

In short, he set the wheels in motion that helped destroy a word via buzzword abuse 🙂 That word is…

"Governance"

See, way, way back in the bowels of time (okay, around 2006), when the stock market was soaring and therefore SOX compliance was being conveniently ignored by investors in equities, Joel’s blog was one of a couple of blogs of any significance SharePoint-wise. He was out there doing his bit for the common good, stressing the importance of governance in the SharePoint world before the word governance was really used in this context. Joel cited this article by Matthew Cain at Gartner which seems to be the root of it all. Now this is perfectly fine and dandy, but Joel made one fatal mistake that we are still feeling the effects of…

He de-nerdified his blog and made this stuff accessible! Thus, somewhere in the world, a marketing person read it and understood just enough syllables to get a gist of what Joel was talking about. Sensing the opportunity to add a new word to glossy brochureware, from that moment forward the true meaning of "governance" was lost forever as the snowball effect of a new buzzword taking root gained momentum. As the snowball rolls faster, more and more vendors get onto the bandwagon, each skewing the definition to suit their own ends.

So now, I am afraid that governance is now irreversibly sliding down the same slippery slope as such luminaries as "convergence", "portal", "ubiquitous", "social networking" and the current cream of the crop – "web 2.0".

…and it’s all Joel’s fault, right? 🙂

So, how to reclaim this word? I don’t know if you can. I have, however, decided to start a social experiment making my own future buzzword. More on that in a minute.

Governance = systems thinking

Before I present my version of what governance really means, I want to enlighten you to an important philosophical concept that underpins governance called "systems thinking" or "the systems approach". Systems thinking approaches problem solving from the perspective that the problem must be looked at as parts of an overall system, rather than focusing on individual outcomes. Wikipedia has quite a nice quote which captures the philosophy nicely.

Systems thinking attempts to illustrate that events are separated by distance and time and that small catalytic events can cause large changes in complex systems. Acknowledging that an improvement in one area of a system can adversely affect another area of the system, it promotes organizational communication at all levels in order to avoid the silo effect.

Either I have been officially typecast, or many organisations are feeling the same pain. The reason I say this is because I’ve been called in to assist organisations that are suffering a crisis of confidence with the SharePoint platform. In each case there are one or more highly visible and persistent problems that are causing user dissatisfaction. That translates to a stressed and under-confident SharePoint/IT project team who are questioning the validity of the SharePoint platform.

My brief in each was to help them pinpoint the root cause of their immediate pain, but in the context of a more holistic review of the SharePoint service to try and identify the gaps that allowed the situation to arise in the first place. The interesting fact about these sites is that they did have governance plans and on the surface of it all, most of the boxes could be ticked.

So, what went wrong?

It all boiled down to this: Stakeholders had a different interpretation of what governance actually means – the curse of a buzzword!. Most stakeholders in fact were more interested in the fact that they had a thirty page document someone wrote with "Governance plan" in the title and thought "okay that’s done, what’s next?".

This is not a systems thinking approach and therefore, this is not good governance. In fact, it really has missed the point entirely.

"SharePoint Assurance" is the new buzzword :-) 

At the end of the day, there are two immutable facts of working life.

1. We are all accountable to someone. Whether it is the board of directors being accountable to shareholders or the guy on the helpdesk being accountable to his operational manager, the vast majority of us are tasked with various responsibilities that our performance is judged on. If we fail to perform to the expectations, we not only let ourselves down, but we can adversely affect others.

2. We all want to go home from work, secure in the knowledge that we performed what was expected of us and we are still going to have a job tomorrow.

Both of these facts underpin the principle that we are all cogs in a complex organisational machine where our individual (and organisation-wide) fate is reliant on each other in complex, often implicit interdependencies.

Governance therefore is all about providing assurance. If you do not provide assurance, you will have fear, uncertainty and doubt. Take a look at the stock markets crashing around the world. Clearly assurance is in extremely short supply!

A Social Experiment

Now what I want to do twofold. For some strange reason I see the funny side of creating a new buzzword and see how long it takes to get to a brochure. Thus I am officially raising a virtual flag and laying claim to being the first person to use the term "SharePoint assurance" instead of SharePoint governance. (at the time of a writing a google search on this phrase yields only 5 hits).

Once you see the term in a marketing brochure, please let me know 🙂

But on a more serious note, I think that assurance in the SharePoint space can be done a lot better than it is and I have a few ideas on how this can be achieved.

More (hopefully much more) on this topic area soon…

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

Arno over at Sharepoint Magazine has published part 5 of my "Leave Form Tribute" series of articles. This latest article is a bit of a graduation from the first four, that were pitched squarely at new users. In part 5 we are now getting into the more advanced stuff – like attempting to explain web services to the masses 😉 I have found this to be a very challenging article to write.

Read it now!

(Nerds are going to find this post dead boring).

Before I start, let me state that I am a believer in the Honey and Mumford theory of learning styles, as well as the Marston DISC assessment. I think both are closely related, and go some way to explaining many mysteries of the world like – "Why are there Metrosexuals?", "Why doesn’t everyone listen to Opeth?" and most importantly of all "What goes on in the strange world that is the engineer mind"?

"Engineer mind"?

Don’t bother googling that term because I made my own definition. I’m really referring to tech nerds generally, but the definition actually extends beyond nerds to a certain type of personality that tends to be a combination of an Activist learning style with a Steady/Conscientious DISC profile.

The point is that engineer minded people live in a factual world. Questions are factual and answers are usually pretty absolute. An engineer’s dogma also has a way to make facts more ‘factual’ in their eyes as well.

For a chunk of the rest of humanity, factual questions are not quite that factual. In many contexts, particularly political ones, a factual question is often open to more liberal interpretation.

This is in essence why engineers dress badly and sales people commonly exhibit metrosexual tendencies. 🙂

Continue reading “It’s all in the way you ask the question…”

I think as you age, you become more and more like your parents. Not so long ago I went out paintballing with some friends and we all agreed that the 16-18 year olds who also happened to be there were all obnoxious little twerps who needed a good kick in the rear. At the same time, we also agreed that we were just as obnoxious back when we were that age. Your perspective changes as you learn and your experience grows, but you don’t forget where you came from.

I now find myself saying stuff to my kids that my parents said to me, I think today’s music is crap, I have taken a liking to drinking quality scotch. Essentially all I need now to complete the metamorphosis to being my father is for all my hair to fall out!

So when I write an article whining about an assertion that IT has a credibility issue and has gone backwards in its ability to cope with various challenges, I fear that I have now officially become my parents. I’ll sound like grandpa who always tells you that life was so much simpler back in the 1940’s.

Consequences of complexity…

Before I go and dump on IT as a discipline, how about we dump on finance as a discipline, just so you can be assured that my cynicism extends far beyond nerds.

I previously wrote about how Sarbanes Oxley legislation was designed to, yet ultimately failed to, provide assurance to investors and regulators that public companies had adequate controls over their financial risk. As I write this, we are in the midst of a once in a generation-or-two credit crisis where some seven hundred billion dollars ($700,000,000,000) of US taxpayers’ money will be used to take ownership of crap assets (foreclosed or unpaid mortgages).

Part of the problem with the credit crisis was through the use of "collateralized debt obligations". This is a fancy, yet complex, way of taking a bunch of mortgages, and turning them into an "asset" that someone else who has some spare cash invests in. If you are wondering why the hell someone would invest in such a thing, then consider people with home loans, supposedly happily paying interest on those mortgages. It is that interest that finds its way to the holder (investor) of the CDO. So a CDO is supposedly an income stream.

Now if that explanation makes your eyes glaze over then I have bad news for you: that’s supposed to be the easy part. The reality is that the CDO’s are actually extremely complex things. They can be backed by residential property, commercial property, something called mortgage backed securities, corporate loans – essentially anything that someone is paying interest on can find its way into a CDO that someone else buys into, to get the income stream from the interest paid.

To provide "assurance" that these CDO’s are "safe", ratings agencies give them a mark that investors rely upon when making their investment. So a "AAA" CDO is supposed to have been given the tick of approval by experts in debt instrument style finance.

Here’s the rub about rating agencies. Below is a news article from earlier in the year with some great quotes

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/23/business/23how.html?pagewanted=print

Credit rating agencies, paid by banks to grade some of the new products, slapped high ratings on many of them, despite having only a loose familiarity with the quality of the assets behind these instruments.

Even the people running Wall Street firms didn’t really understand what they were buying and selling, says Byron Wien, a 40-year veteran of the stock market who is now the chief investment strategist of Pequot Capital, a hedge fund. “These are ordinary folks who know a spreadsheet, but they are not steeped in the sophistication of these kind of models,” Mr. Wien says. “You put a lot of equations in front of them with little Greek letters on their sides, and they won’t know what they’re looking at.”

Mr. Blinder, the former Fed vice chairman, holds a doctorate in economics from M.I.T. but says he has only a “modest understanding” of complex derivatives. “I know the basic understanding of how they work,” he said, “but if you presented me with one and asked me to put a market value on it, I’d be guessing.”

What do we see here? How many people really *understand* what’s going on underneath the complexity?

Of course, we now know that many of the mortgages backing these CDO’s were made to people with poor credit history, or with a high risk of not being able to pay the loans back. Jack up the interest rate or the cost of living and people foreclose or do not pay the mortgage. When that happens en masse, we have a glut of houses for sale, forcing down prices, lowering the value of the assets, eliminating the "income stream" that CDO investors relied upon, making them pretty much worthless.

My point is that the complexity of the CDO’s were such that even a guy with a doctorate in economics only had a ‘modest understanding’ of them. Holy crap! If he doesn’t understand it then who the hell does?

Thus, the current financial crisis is a great case study in the relationship between complexity and risk.

Consequences of complexity (IT version)…

One thing about doing what I do, is that you spent a lot of time on-site. You get to see the IT infrastructure  and development at many levels. But more importantly, you also spend a lot of time talking to IT staff and organisation stakeholders with a very wide range of skills and experience. Finally and most important of all, you get to see first hand organisational maturity at work.

My conclusion? IT is completely f$%#ed up across all disciplines and many will have their own mini equivalent of the US $700 billion dollar haemorrhage. Not only that, it is far worse today than it previously was – and getting worse! IT staff are struggling with ever accelerating complexity and the "disconnect" between IT and the business is getting worse as well. To many businesses, the IT department has a credibility problem, but to IT the feeling is completely mutual 🙂

You can find a nice thread about this topic on slashdot. My personal favourite quote from that thread is this one

Let me just say, after 26 years in this business, of hearing this every year, the systems just keep getting more complex and harder to maintain, rather than less and easier.

Windows NT was supposed to make it so anyone who could use Windows could manage a server.

How many MILLION MSCEs do we have in the world now?

Storage systems with Petabytes of data are complex things. Cloud computing is a complex thing. Supercomputing clusters are complex things. World-spanning networks are complex things.

No offense intended, but the only people who think things are getting easier are people who don’t know how they work in the first place

Also there is this…

There are more software tools, programming languages, databases, report writers, operating systems, networking protocols, etc than ever before. And all these tools have a lot more features than they used to. It’s getting increasingly harder to know "some" of them well. Gone are the days when just knowing DOS, UNIX, MVS, VMS, and OS/400 would basically give you knowledge of 90% of the hardware running. Or knowing just Assembly/C/Cobol/C++ would allow you to read and maintain most of the source code being used. So I would argue that the need for IT staff is going to continue to increase.

I think the "disconnect" between IT and Business has a lot more to do with the fact that business "knows" they depend on IT, but they are frustrated that IT can’t seem to deliver what they want when they want it. On the other side, IT has to deal with more and more tools and IT staff has to learn more and more skills. And to increase frustration in IT, business users frequently don’t deliver clear requirements or they "change" their mind in the middle of projects….

So it seems that I am not alone 🙂

I mentioned previously that more often than not, SQL Server is poorly maintained – I see it all the time. Yet today I was speaking to a colleague who is a storage (SAN) and VMware virtualisation god. I asked him what the average VMware setup was like and his answer was similar to my SQL Server and SharePoint experience. In his experience, most of them were sub-optimally configured, poorly maintained, poorly documented and he could not provide any assurance as to the stability of the platform.

These sorts of quality assurance issues are rampant in application development too. I see the same thing most definitely in the security realm too.

As the above quote sates, "it’s increasingly harder to know *some* of them well". These days I am working with specialists who live and breathe their particular discipline (such as storage, virtualisation, security or comms). Those disciplines over time grow more complex and sub-disciplines appear.

Pity then, the poor developer/sysadmin/IT manager who is trying to keep a handle on all of this and try to provide a decent service to their organisation!

Okay, so what? IT has always been complex – I sound like a Gartner cliche. What’s this got to do with SharePoint?

Consequences of SharePoint complexity…

SharePoint, for a number of reasons, is one of those products that has a way of really laying bare any gaps that the organisation has in terms of their overall maturity around technology and strategy.

Why?

Because it is so freakin’ complex! That complexity transcends IT disciplines and goes right to the heart organisational/people issues as well.

It’s bad enough getting nerds to agree on something, let alone organisation-wide stakeholders!

Put simply, if you do a half-arsed job of putting SharePoint in, you will be punished in so many ways! The simple fact is that the odds are against you before you even start because it only takes a mistake in one particular part of the complex layers of hardware, systems, training, methodology, information architecture and governance, to devalue the whole project.

When I first started out, I was helping organizations get SharePoint installed. However lately I am visiting a lot of sites where SharePoint has already been installed, but it has not been a success. There are various reasons;I have cited them in detail in the project failure series, so I won’t rehash all that here. (I’d suggest reading parts three, four and five in particular).

I am firmly of the conclusion that much of SharePoint is more art than science, and what’s more, the organisation has to be ready to come with you. Due to differing learning styles and poor communication of strategy, this is actually pretty rare. Unfortunately, IT are not the people who are well suited to "getting the organisation ready for SharePoint."

If that wasn’t enough, then there is this question. If IT already struggle to manage the underlying infrastructure and systems that underpin SharePoint, then how can you have any assurance that IT will have a "governance epiphany" and start doing things the right way?

This translates to risk, people! I will be writing all about risk in a similar style to the CFO Return on Investment series very soon. I am very interested in methods to quantify the risk brought about by the complexity of SharePoint and the IT services it relies on. For me, I see a massive parallel from the complexity factor in the current financial crisis and I think that a lot can be learned from it. SOX was supposed to provide assurance and yet did nothing to prevent the current crisis. Therefore, SOX represents a great example of mis-focused governance where a lot of effort can be put in for no tangible gain.

A quick test of "assurance"…

Governance is like learning to play the guitar. It takes practice, and it does not give up its secrets easily and despite good intent, you will be crap at it for a while. It is easy to talk about, but putting it into practice is another thing.

Just remember this. The whole point of the exercise is to provide *assurance* to stakeholders. When you set any rule, policy, procedure, standard (or similar), just ask yourself: Does this provide me the assurance I need that gives me confidence to vouch for the service I am providing? Just because you may be adopting ITIL principles, does *not* mean that you are necessarily providing the right sort assurance that is required.

I’ll leave you with a somewhat biased, yet relatively easy litmus test that you can use to test your current level of assurance.

It might be simplistic, but if you are currently scared to apply a service pack to SharePoint, then you might have an assurance issue. 🙂

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Microsoft bashing is a favourite pastime of many a nerd. Whether it is justified or not in many cases is debatable since M$ will never please everyone. But the point is, it is cathartic and in actual fact, good therapy because venting your frustrations at Bill Gates is much healthier than at your colleagues or family.

To my Microsoft employee friends reading this. Don’t feel all defensive – some of the very best Microsoft bashing I have ever heard comes from you guys anyway 🙂

So although sometimes the M$ bashing is completely unjustified, long shall it continue to preserve the sanity of IT professionals around the globe.

Having said that, on occasion you will hit some Microsoft induced pain that is legitimately and frustratingly dumb. By "legitimately", I mean that you cannot say "although in hindsight it was dumb, I can actually understand why they decided to do that". Instead you get caught out and experience pain and frustration simply because of a silly Microsoft oversight.

In this case, the oversight is with the SharePoint Configuration Wizard

Continue reading “Sometimes "Microsoft bashing" is justified”

Hi all

Arno over at SharePoint Magazine has published part 4 of my "Tribute to the humble leave form" series. This series is aimed at beginners and those starting out in SharePoint. This particular post covers publishing to forms services for the first time.

cheers

Paul

p.s Want a new certification? Try the CCLFD 🙂