Hi all

I know statistically it’s meaningless and is hugely subjective, but it looks like I have ended this week (and this month), having finally cracked the million hits mark. Of course, the significance is about the same as when you think its cool when your car speedo clocks over from 99,999 miles to 100,000.

But to those of you that visit this site, thanks so much for your patronage and feedback. Hopefully if SharePoint (and IT in general) doesn’t send me completely insane, then some bigger and better things are to come.

Paul Culmsee

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”

My little boy will be turning four this weekend. We are hosting one of those parties with a zillion toddlers, copious amounts of candy and a bouncy castle.

He seems to have gotten through the toddler tantrum stage without causing us too much heartache and is now into the philosophical stage where he asks some surprisingly insightful questions. He asked me "Where did the first baby come from?" and so I messed with his head a little with the chicken and egg paradox :-). Other questions that come to mind include, on being woken up by him one morning, "Why do we have blood in our body?", "When I’m all grown up, who will be your little boy?" and "Will I have a little boy when I’m bigger?"

The other day when we were discussing family relations and related terms, he retorted pretty definitively "You are not my parents. You are my Mummy and Daddy!"

So, you can imagine my surprise and amusement when he recently asked me "Why is there fire on the sun?" I mean he’s turning four – how do you answer that?

Rather than try and water it down, I explained it like a tech-guy would. I casually spent about 3 minutes explaining in detail the process of nuclear fusion in the core of a star and how lighter elements fuse into heavier elements, releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the process. He listened intently, not missing a beat. When I had finished my explanation, I asked him if he understood all that I had told him.

Without even the slightest hesitation he said definitively,

"Yes, Daddy."

.. and then went back to playing Wii Sports.

I then realised that he has all the qualifications needed to have a long and very successful career in IT or finance.

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!

Had a good laugh over at the register today with this anti google article written by Ted Dziuba. I am his newest fan.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/22/dziuba_anti_revolution/

The laughter came from the fact that its very well written with a ton of sarcasm. The google bash is actually secondary to the underlying message about panacea and bandwagonning that all vendors are guilty of

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 … This situation gets really dangerous when you start to involve people from San Francisco. Every person who lives in San Francisco has the intention of starting a nonprofit organization of some sort. Therefore, if you collect a bunch of Web 2.0 engineers in San Francisco, the inevitable outcome is the OpenSocial Foundation: a nonprofit organization that only exists to support an API for programming social network applications

If I could get away with his sarcasm I would 🙂

Paul Culmsee

When I wrote the series on SharePoint project failure, I had (and still have) a strong belief that I had gotten fairly close to the root causes of many a failed SharePoint project. As a result of this, I approach SharePoint engagements somewhat differently I think, to many other consultants in the space. I’ll write about my approaches sometime, but you can probably get a fair idea from reading the project fail stuff.

Anyhow, my last few SharePoint engagements have gone really well, so well in fact I’ve not had much opportunity to write too much. But I thought I’d share this one little story for you.

This week I was out on site at a client, and my main contact (and internal SharePoint "champion") told me that she was demonstrating some particular functionality to one of the users and the user said "Oh, I’ve seen this already, David showed me".

"David" in this case happens to be the CEO of the organisation 🙂

Moral?

You know that you have done a good job when the CEO has become an evangelist for you!

I’ve been sick as a dog since last Saturday and been off work all of this week. The worst flu I’ve had in years. Thus I’ve been feeling like complete crap, irritable to everyone I go near, running a temperature, skullsplitting headaches and coughing up stuff that could easily be in an X-Files episode.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, because of the above factors I f%#$ing *forgot* about the Opeth concert that I opted out of Tech-Ed for! They played last night and I only realised today!

Many swearwords were uttered today when I realised – it’s enough to make a grown man cry!

Here is a recent little story about when, in the name of "security", a really dumb thing was done, and the response that said a lot about the security posture of those behind the response.

A client of mine has 4 servers (2 for an Active Directory domain, and two for SharePoint/SQL server) hosted with an external provider. I was commissioned to perform a fairly standard install of MOSS 2007 enterprise.

My former life in security still influences me to this day, and thus I always build SharePoint in a fairly locked down fashion. So, apart from some strict naming conventions among components, I used a bunch of user accounts to run the various SharePoint services. I made sure that none of which have any privileges over and above what they absolutely require for SharePoint to work.

The install was fairly flawless and was over in a couple of hours, however my client called me half a day later to let me know that search was broken.

Continue reading “All in the name of "security"…”