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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• 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
• The facets of collaboration Part 5 – It’s all Gen-Y’s fault – or is it?

Hi all and welcome to part three of my series on unpacking this mysterious phenomenon known as collaboration. In case you missed the first two articles (and I highly suggest that you read part 1 and part 2), I spent some 500 odd hours last year developing a SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture course. Amongst the sweat and tears of that particular endeavour, I researched many papers and online articles that attempt to look at the multitude of factors and variables that impact on collaborative scenarios where SharePoint might be leveraged. I also talked about Robot-Barbie, which represents the tendency for SharePoint features to be combined in such a way where the benefit gained is much less than the potential of the individual parts. Robot-Barbie solutions are to be avoided at all costs.

In part 2, I explained each of the facets using the model above, identifying four key facets for collaborative facets: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

An interesting use of the facet diagram is to plot where various tools and technologies are located and therefore, where their strengths may be. In this article, we will go through some of SharePoint’s collaborative components and see how they fit together.

The document is dead – long live wikis?

When I have asked people to draw where Wikipedia lies on the facets, the most common answer by far is on the trait side of the collaborative fence. This seems relatively straightforward. After all, the authors of Wikipedia articles obviously have a shared interest in the topic matter. Without an interest in the topic, there would be little incentive to take the time to write about it. Furthermore with Wikipedia, authors are highly unlikely to be working on the same project or task, since the author can be anybody in the world. But, authors are likely to be performing similar tasks in their respective organisations. A classic trait based scenario.

Wikis also are open and essentially unstructured, relying on authors to link to other content to build contextual relevance. By this logic, Wikipedia is a strong trait based collaborative system and the dominant process driving the use of the tool is insight more than process. Therefore wikis are socially oriented more than transactional. I would suggest that very few Wikipedia authors indeed would be driven by a process that mandating they update an entry.

Closer to SharePoint home, Look at the success of SPDevWiki as another example. If you were to plot it across the spectrum (and remember this is about collaboration using the tool, not individual use), it would appear in a similar position on the model to Wikipedia. People use SpDevWiki because they wish to develop and contribute to a repository of knowledge to help others in similar situations. This reciprocal behaviour serves to help the individual in their own endeavours.

But there is an interesting change if I ask people to simply draw “a wiki” on the model, rather than the specific example of Wikipedia (the mother of all wikis). The model tends to look something like the image below. Suddenly the scope of wikis expands more into transactional, but few people draw a wiki across the whole collaboration spectrum. As a result of this pattern, one question I make a point of asking people in all of my classes is whether they have ever seen or used a successful project management wiki. I have asked this question in London, New Zealand and around Australia, and the overwhelming answer is no. One respondent stated that his organisation had implemented a project management wiki, but conceded that he was the only one who maintained it.

The reason I continually ask this question is that I wanted to know if the pattern I had observed was common, as I can only base observation from my own client base. Using my clients, I have seen two occasions where wikis were particularly successful. The first was a wiki for programmers who worked for the same company and the second was a school, where teachers maintained a wiki as part of a SharePoint solution that we put in. Both of these examples are clearly trait dominant in that the authors were in a very similar role. Perhaps a gross generalisation is that wiki’s are best suited to trait/social based collaborative scenarios? If so, it raises an important issue. If a task based collaboration effort has a varied mix of participants, then using the model suggests a wiki may not necessarily be the way to go.

By the way, I have learned over the years that as soon as you make an assertion to rightness, someone will come along and prove you wrong. For example, I strongly advise people not to use the Microsoft pizza/pie diagram to introduce SharePoint to new users, but Ruven Gotz proves that it is perfectly acceptable to do so. Therefore in the example above I am only reporting on my observations, plus feedback from those who have attended my classes. I am not trying to prove right or wrong here as I know many will disagree with the diagram. But what I am interested in, if you can prove the assertion wrong, is what you did to make a wiki successful in the other quadrants?

Wikis vs. Custom lists

In typical SharePoint fashion, there is always ten ways to do something, each with their own pros and cons. Both wikis and SharePoint lists are flexible information repositories, that differ by the degree of structure imposed. Lists offer the creation of custom columns of different kinds, that allow tables of information to be stored and via the use of views, to make sense of the content. You get a few other niceties like datasheet view, attaching files, and export to Excel/MSAccess. In fact, many people like to adopt lists because they previously used Excel for storing information and Sharepoint offers similar functionality with improved data entry and multi-user support.

Someone once told me that more critical corporate data is stored in excel than any other database system in the world. I am not surprised in the slightest.

When asked to place where SharePoint lists fit on the facets model, many users tend to link it to transactional based collaboration that is equally task or trait based. Lists it seems, are well suited to tracking “stuff”, which lends itself naturally to transactional collaboration where process tends to govern interaction.

Lists also tend to need more up-front work where a wiki usually does not. Before content can be effectively added to a list, you need to define columns or content types in advance and hope that you get it right. Information Architects routinely get paid to help do this. Remember that transactional collaboration is the world of well-defined inputs, because process governs the interaction. As such, project delivery (a transactional/task oriented process) often uses list based techniques because of the improved ability to track, slice and dice information, when compared to a wiki. Dux Sy’s book on using SharePoint for Project Management is a good illustration of this approach. Wiki’s do not even get mentioned in Dux’s book. Why is this? Perhaps the tracking of time, resources, costs, risks, constraints and work performed is best delivered via lists? Certainly, more fully fledged PMIS systems like Microsoft Project Server are highly database driven and designed for transactional work.

It is then quite interesting to overlay SharePoint lists and wiki’s together. Is it possible to make a more educated call as to when one option is more suited than the other? Take a knowledgebase scenario which could easily be either a wiki or a list. Perhaps the decision as to use wiki or list should be based on the nature of the collaboration? If a bunch of people linked by trait are creating a knowledge repository, a wiki is a proven approach – Wikipedia shows this to be the case. But if this is for say, a more transactional scenario such as a call-center, where KPI’s are based around quick turnaround and resolution of common problems, a list approach might be better?

At this point I can feel the heat of offended Enterprise 2.0 fanboys. Please understand, I am not anti wiki’s or anything 2.0 – we use these tools in our practice. Furthermore SharePoint blurs the above distinction anyway. Columns can be added to wikis and they leverage SharePoint’s version history too. In other words, you can make a wiki look and feel somewhat like a list. Furthermore, SharePoint wikis can be integrated with information management policies and workflow. When you add those additional capabilities to the mix, you might draw things differently. Nevertheless, I think this is a useful exercise because it might offer insight as to why certain portal features rarely, if ever get used in certain situations.

Document Collaboration – Transactional or Social?

Finally for now, document based collaboration seems to fit into any quadrant (and is therefore quite tricky at times). This is because the “document” is simply a medium of collaboration (as is a wiki for that matter).

For one extreme, take the example of a quality management system (policies, procedures, manuals). Given that a QMS is usually part of a compliance regime, requiring audits and demonstrated conformance, document collaboration is fairly rule-based and managed via well defined and understood process. Therefore, we are talking transactional work. In this world, SharePoint features like content types, metadata, policies and workflow are fairly easy to define and implement.

But a QMS, via policies and procedures, guide the behaviour and decision making in organisations. So while transactional, it is oriented towards trait based. This is because a QMS is rarely installed to deliver a single project, but to guide delivery of many projects. One thing that might be guided by a QMS is the creation of a legal contract that outlines the scope and responsibilities of two parties undertaking a project. Documents such as contracts, while also usually transactional, are task based they outline a legal commitment to achieving an agreed outcome.

Contrast this with a team collaborating via documents. A team can be driven by an outcome or common interest (department) and as a result covers both the task and trait based quadrants. Often the rules of engagement are much less rigid or formalised with regards to document use and structure. Thus, a lot of team document collaboration is more social and trying to fit this into an overly strict or complex taxonomy can do more harm than good. I noticed with great interest that recently, certain SharePoint elephants in the room are starting to be named. The recent articles on NothingButSharePoint entitled “SharePoint Content Types: Is this a lost cause?”, highlights what I mean. In this article, repeated attempts were made to try and harness the value and power of content types into a large enterprise. However despite the effort, they were rarely used.

To me, this highlights the characteristic of team collaboration – particularly knowledge workers. If collaboration is not a predefined interaction, then content types, which by definition, force us to go to a lot of effort to define inputs when those inputs are not necessarily known. Perhaps the nature of the collaboration taking place played a part in the lack of take-up reported in the aforementioned article? Those who advocate metadata as the only true solution may in fact be pushing a transactional paradigm onto a collaborative model that is ill-suited?

As a general rule, in transactional scenarios, the classification of the document is of more importance than the content of the document. This is the records management and compliance paradigm, where the fact that the document is controlled is the key driver. However, in team collaborative scenarios, the content of the document is usually more important than the metadata classifying it. From a team members point of view, metadata that helps to indicate content is more important than metadata that indicates compliance.

As documents age however, the value of the content tends to diminish and the value of the classification increases. Balancing the need for compliance against the need for collaboration is a key document management challenge irrespective of the tools and systems that underpin it. There is a large smackdown looming between the worlds of compliance vs. the world of government and enterprise 2.0 and I will eventually write on that topic.

Once again, the key point here is context. Some document oriented collaborative scenarios are highly structured and well suited to well-defined taxonomy and metadata. Others are somewhat less so. Perhaps a tool like this helps to work out when certain information architecture decisions are applicable when it comes to document collaboration?

Conclusion

You might have noticed that this post has more questions than answers. In doing a model, I never said I would provide more answers. Instead, more of a frame or perspective to ask certain types of questions that many SharePoint practitioners have increasingly be asking (as evidenced by the content type post above). In the next post, I will conclude by using the facets to examine several common arguments seen in organisations, where people in particular roles are in effect, predisposed to having a bias in one or more of these facets. We will also look at SharePoint as a whole, as well as examine what we can glean about user engagement and buy-in.

Until then, thanks for reading.

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Having spoken at the odd SharePoint event over the last three years or so, I’ve always lamented on the lack of a purely business focused SharePoint conference. Whilst the conferences I attend do cater for non technology oriented topics – particularly the best practice conferences, there is usually an equal or greater proportion of content aimed at the nerdier aspects of SharePoint.

Sadly though, nerds don’t often sign the cheques. Those who do sign them, are rarely interested in deploying SharePoint via Powershell, or why sandboxed solutions are a good thing or not. They are looking for the ways and means to take SharePoint (the enabler) and work out what the hell SharePoint is enabling and to work out if it has done so properly.

Some time back, via a reference from Kristian Kalsing, I received a call from the organisers of the forthcoming Share2010 in Sydney, asking for feedback on what I would like to see in a good business focused SharePoint conference. In speaking to Steve from Eventful Management and his team, it was clear that something unique was in the making here.

Fast forward several months and after a whole lot of market research and round-table discussions from SharePoint customers (including a couple of our clients), we have a conference that puts many critical topics close to my heart, front and centre, namely governance, user engagement and adaption, business process automation and workflow; information architecture; collaboration; document and records management; resourcing and support; social networking; ROI; security and so on.

I am honoured that I was also asked to participate as a speaker at this conference, along side the likes of Dux Sy, Erica Toelle, Andrew Jolly and Michael Sampson. You will find that speakers from this group have one thing in common: Their focus on the softer areas of SharePoint. There are also speakers from some of Australia’s leading organisations (and some international ones too), who will share their trials, tribulations and lessons learned. This is real problem/real solution type stuff and I am seriously looking forward to being part of it.

I’ll be involved in the initial festivities on the Sunday evening, conducting a special interest kickoff session called SharePoint Governance Home Truths. This session aims to present a lot of my work in a more relaxed, entertaining manner and hopefully, set a good tone for the rest of the event.

I will also be running a special event on Wednesday called “Microsoft SharePoint Governance f-Laws: Handy Hints for Those Who Question Business as Usual”. I am really excited about this. Developing the content for this session has been a labour of love for me since November last year – and is a kind of magnum opus of everything I have learned in my IT and non IT work. I have been very fortunate to work on some very large and complex non IT projects and worked with some amazingly talented people in the areas of project management, cognitive science, facilitation and community engagement. I can absolutely guarantee you that there will be many aspects to this session that would not have been seen before in one place in this distilled form. I am super excited about delivering this in full at Share2010 – there simply could not be a better conference for this type of workshop.

By the way, I used elements of this material in the SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture course that was developed for the Microsoft NZ/3Grow Elite Program. The feedback from that course speaks for itself.

The outcomes to expect for attendee of this session are:

• Understand the SharePoint governance lens beyond an IT service delivery focus
• Develop your ‘wicked problem’ radar and apply appropriate governance practices, tools and techniques accordingly
• Learn how to align SharePoint projects to broad organisational goals, avoid chasing platitudes and ensure that the problem being solved is the right problem
• Understand the relationship between governance and assurance, why both are needed and how they affect innovation
• Understand the underlying, often hidden forces of organisational chaos that underpins projects like SharePoint

There is a large amount of content and activities in this session that has never graced CleverworkArounds. In fact, if I ever get around to posting some of the content, I could blog for months. But more importantly than the content, you will have a lot of practical tools to leverage as well. Attendees to my session will receive a CD containing end-to-end governance artefacts ranging from IBIS maps, goal alignment and performance framework outputs, envisioning workshop sample outputs, Information Architecture mind-maps, BPMN diagrams, wireframes, user engagement tools, ROI calculations and more.

As it happens, I collaborated on a lot of this stuff with Erica Toelle, so it is terrific that she is speaking at the event and her “Don’t reinvent the wheel” talk should not be missed, as well as her Tuesday keynote. If I ask her nicely, she might just pop a few of her goodies onto the CD as well!

You can register here, for this unique event, and let’s hope that there are many more to come. There is opportunity for one on one meetings with speakers like myself as part of the deal.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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A while back I posted about the book I am writing with Kailash Awati (Beyond Best Practices). If that project wasn’t taking enough time, dedication and brain cells, I have just finished an undertaking that has essentially consumed me for four months (some 450 man hours). This week it was delivered and the student responses far surpassed my expectations and made it all worthwhile.

I created a 4 day SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture training course as part of Microsoft New Zealand’s Elite initiative. (760 pages of SharePoint governance and IA goodness!) If you are not aware of the Elite initiative, it is a novel initiative by Microsoft in New Zealand to improve the quality of SharePoint practitioners in the Microsoft partner ecosystem. Now I tell you – Darryl Burling and his team down there at Microsoft have their ear to the ground – and really do listen to their customers. They initiated this program to allow local solution providers to take the next step beyond technical knowhow and turn it into deeper proficiency.

The SharePoint Elite Partner Initiative is designed to recognise those New Zealand Partners who have built skills excellence and a track record for success with SharePoint into their business. When it comes to SharePoint, these are the elite – the best of the best. If you are looking for a partner who can help you plan and deploy your SharePoint implementation, these are the best in the business.

This Elite program is unique in its focus and via the insight of those who conceived it, allowed me the flexibility to create a course that was a balance of technical labs, sensemaking, governance, critical thinking and user engagement. I was going through the course feedback just now and the key trend from it all was that the students really enjoyed the softer stuff that I teach, more so than the “here is a SharePoint feature and look at what it can do!” type material (they can get that sort of material anywhere).

So all in all it was a great week, which made all the effort, sweat and tears leading up to it worth it.

So thanks attendees, it was a great 4 days. For other readers, hopefully the course might come to a city near you in the not too distant future.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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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

                      

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Opeth \m/ \m/

Firstly, SharePoint, in my opinion, is a collaborative platform, more than it is a collaborative product. In the same way that Lotus Notes can be argued as a messaging platform. Both have their core competencies and solve particular types of problems. However, they can also be customised and sophisticated applications can be built upon the foundation they provide.  Note my emphasis on the word collaborative.

Secondly, like heavy metal, the term “document management“, is misused and misunderstood. It is simply a generic concept that needs to be broken down into sub-definitions or sub genres.

For those people who think the idea of listening to Celine Dion is a good way to spend an hour, it is exceedingly likely that they would consider heavy metal to be a single genre. But of course, us metalheads would beg to differ. As an example, you have Black metal, Death metal, Glam metal, Industrial metal, Power metal, Progressive metal and Thrash metal to name but a few. (However I personally would put power metal in the same bucket as a Celine CD )

So I am a progressive metalhead, I love Opeth and I would consider them to be the absolute masters of progressive metal genre. But, they are a band that frequently uses the ‘cookie monster’ vocal grunts commonly associated with death metal. Does that make them a death metal band? No it doesn’t. They may share some of the characteristics of death metal but are a very different beast.

So, as part of collaborating, we need to manage documents. We have a team of staff all working to achieve a goal and along the way, they need to work together as efficiently as possible. Time is money. That means timely access to the latest version of a document no matter where you are; the ability to track and maintain versions of documents; the ability to enforce internal processes such as peer review and signoff and so on.

Often, the end goal of this process is a document or set of documents that have a ‘final’ or ‘legal’ aspect to them. For example: A final report to a customer. Such a document needs to have this version, at this point in time, captured. At this point, the document becomes a record.

Now collaborative document management is very different from the more rigid and structured form of document management known as records management. Records are defined as “information created, received, and maintained as evidence and information by an organization or person, in pursuance of legal obligations or in the transaction of business”.

A really, brilliant, insightful post on this subject can be found at joiningdots blog and I am going to quote his list of the activities in relation to these two genres of document management.

Records Management:

• Management of the record is more important than the content of the record
• The record never changes (although its properties might)
• Records require access controls, lots of them

Document Management/Collaboration:

• Without content there is no document
• The document changes a lot, that’s the whole point of collaboration
• Access controls restrict and impede collaboration, the fewer there are the better

Now to continue the metaphor, here is the explanation of death metal vs progressive metal

So collaborative document management and records management are similar to Progressive Metal and Death metal. They have some common characteristics, but have different goals and outcomes. Let’s now look at some of these characteristics in a SharePoint environment.

SharePoint Document Management Sucks?

No, it does not suck (although I will keep an eye on my website stats to see if a controversial title means more readers )

In my opinion, SharePoint is a really good collaborative document management system. It, however, is not as good a records management system.

Collaboration is about teams and productivity. What makes one team productive is not necessarily the same as what makes another team productive. A site with a document library for a sales and marketing team will likely have different columns, views and workflows than a document library for a bunch of IT geeks who are writing system documentation (yeah right – geeks write documents? )

SharePoint is great for document collaboration, because it is so flexible in how you structure sites and document libraries. It is common to see a SharePoint farm broken into broad, divisional based portal sites, with team based sub-sites within. There is often one or two columns that are relatively consistent across all document libraries in the farm. In addition to this, the various document libraries and content types within these sites will often have additional different columns, based on specific requirements of the team or division using that library.

There may be some file naming standards, but if not it doesn’t matter much, since the users can easily fill in the metadata columns when they save a document. ‘Folder hell’ is reduced and views allow for easer retrieval. Roaming users have offline copies of document libraries either in Outlook, Groove, Colligo or iORA and regularly sync the latest versions.

What a wonderful picture I paint ,eh? I can see Opeth right now, storing all of their tour info in their tours document library, but using a different document library for their songs guitar tab. The latter has a column that classifies the tab by album and author. Michael Akerfeldt, (Opeth’s amazingly talented singer/songwriter) has a sync version of all of this in Outlook on his laptop.

Compare to this…

A records management system is like a single giant document library. The columns are usually standard, no matter what the content. Usually the classification system (called a taxonomy) is based around a coding system that among other things, indicates record types, and the retention policy and compliance requirements for that record type.

That coding system is called a “File Plan”, and record managers love them, but the rest of us hate them with passion. Why? Well, they have about the same level of intuitiveness as the account codes for a chart of accounts, or time-sheets for that matter.

But they all serve a similar purpose, so I guess that makes sense. So I’ll explain better.

For general collaborative use between a team, record file plans just plain suck. This is because the coding system is based around “file codes” which are numeric representations of the taxonomy classifications. Those numbers mean a lot to the records people, but are not intuitive at all to the rest of us. Usually records are sub-classified 2 or 3 levels as well, as it’s rare to have a single level file plan. So here’s Opeth’s example file plan…

401 110 – Reports and Statistics

1.0 Merchandise

2.0 Tours

        2.1 Sweden

        2.2 Norway

(rock on baby! – file plans are just so metal!)

So imagine the above code along with a file number for the document, a number for its version, etc.

401-110-2_1-12345_003.DOC

Now quite obviously if you are a record manager, this document is a report (401-110) about a gig in Sweden (2_1) that is document number 12345 and version number 3 (003).

I can just see Opeth’s Michael Akerfeldt using that naming convention for all his documents relating to the Sweden tour! Then when the tour is over, he can easily archive off his Sweden stuff (401-110-2_1) onto DVD!

Makes me wanna mosh! … NOT!

So many document libraries is not really a good thing for records management. Also, in SharePoint, a file plan style set of columns is difficult. it’s quite painful to have one column filter the value of another out of the box (ie pick your first category column and the list of values in the sub category is filtered). It’s a custom development job or you have to go with a 3rd party if you want to do that.

But no doubt you are aware that there is a records management capability in SharePoint 2007. But in reality, it’s not that fully featured. For the purpose of this article, I won’t get into that, but consider that the data is all in a big SQL Database. Typically this uses a very expensive, high capacity disk, yet some records, according to the file plan, are not worth the cost of that disk. (I.e. it costs more to store than the files are worth). But how to put them onto cheaper servers/media? if it’s one big document library then it’s one big SQL database.

Now don’t think for a second that I’m anti records management. I’m not at all. It is an essential technology. I’m just dumping on it from the collaborative end-user perspective to help my argument .

Confusion reigns!

Now in all seriousness, I have painted a pretty extreme example I know. But many companies do attempt to go down the path of treating all files as a record when they implement a document management system. Obviously record oriented file naming conventions like the one I demonstrated will not work for regular users, but many companies previously had a dedicated document control department for handling them, and only a small subset of the files (the ones that are records ) are treated this way . But when you get a system like SharePoint, it’s easy to think, “cool, now we can classify ALL documents via our file plan and make it much easier to manage our documents”

For me, that doesn’t compute. Power metal has the same effect for me.. what’s the point?

Does it work? I’m sure it does for many organisations. Some high end, 3rd party DMS products have been doing it for years. For me though, I was involved in a non SharePoint DMS installation back in the late nineties. Despite a pretty good GUI, with nice drop downs and easy to navigate metadata screen, the classification system was still too complex for the user base and they misclassified all of their files when saving.

Records Management then one day did an archive of a particular file code because the retention schedule told them to. The next day all hell broke loose! Users live files suddenly disappeared and the system happily presented them with a CD number, asking them to call records management department

I’ve never seen such a quick file plan redesign

So why is it that many companies confuse collaborative document management and records management? I’m not sure, but I sure as hell know that for my money, you should not approach SharePoint 2007 with some preconceived idea that it is going to solve all your records management needs. I can predict it now. You will spend weeks arguing with the stakeholders over a taxonomy, document a file plan that they will all approve, despite not actually reading and then find that SharePoint cannot easily accommodate your requirements out of the box. Your project plan and budget will blow out, senior management will be pissed and you will blame Microsoft for releasing a substandard product.

But who’s fault is it really?

Thanks for reading..

P.S: Recommended Opeth tracks: Bleak, Deliverance, Master’s Apprentice, Drapery Falls

                      

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