Adoption is a fulltime job,” said Staresina. “Forget if you build it they will come.
A quote from Emily Staresina about the SharePoint + Newsgator intranet recently implemented at Australian property development company, Stockland. Since they launched at the end of last year, about a quarter of Stockland staff have completed their Newsgator profiles.
why do we provide our users with out of the box [SharePoint] Team Sites that contain a bunch of senseless containers for information that offer no guidance as to what they should be doing with these things (Shared Documents, Discussions, Tasks, Announcements and so on)? A SharePoint Site is simply a medium with which to accomplish a business goal, outcome or process. You need to provide your users with clear guidance around what function the site will serve. Simply telling them to use a Team Site is not going to provide clear context to users working within.
Further exacerbating this is that now not only do users not have any idea where to store things, they now have little idea about how to store them. With the new capabilities that SharePoint offers beyond that of a simple fileshare users are further confused about what is the best medium for their content. So should be they putting a team meeting in the shared calendar, or should it go in the announcements list or maybe they should email out to everyone and store it in a document library?
The Fix?
The fix is to inject the context that users need into the sites that you create. To accomplish that you need liberal doses of Information Architecture, an understanding of user requirements, an appreciation of the processes they are using all combined with the SharePoint configuration options that leverage this (metadata, content types, document and list naming, navigation and so on).
All sound advice for SharePoint champions from Michal Pisarek, but it also highlights how much reinventing the wheel goes on with collaboration technologies (actually, in the intranet space as a whole).
Obviously the actual configuration options and methods are specific to SharePoint, but the idea applies to all collaboration tools. If you aren't helping users customise their online workspaces then you will make it harder for them to make sense of the underlying tools. This is potentially one important difference between 'community management' on the public Web versus inside organisations, which should include moderation and curation plus workspace design.
Pisarek's post is also a reminder that so far SharePoint really hasn't taken us far beyond the original Lotus Notes collaboration paradigm - we were doing this kind of contextual customisation at E&Y with Notes and Quickplace back in the early 2000s. Take a look at a product like Newsgator to get a sense of where we should be taking users on their SharePoint journey.
Hat tip Alex.
Prepared in partnership with Microsoft, the "Accessibility in SharePoint 2010" document sets out the learning from Vision Australia's experiences to date delivering an accessible implementation of SharePoint 2010, including our assessment of SharePoint 2010 conformance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0).
And their conclusion? After examining SharePoint 2010's Document Management and Team Sites features they found:
"While SharePoint 2010 offers improved accessibility out of the box, a successful implementation is reliant on appropriate customisation and governance as part of a SharePoint deployment. "
They do also consider the issue of user-created content, although I sense they are treating SharePoint as a WCMS rather than a collaborative platform since their advice includes:
Remember, the content in your intranet or extranet needs to be accessible too, not just the shell of the Website it sits within. This expands the scope well beyond SharePoint alone (and this is true for any Web platform used in the same way). I mention this because historically organisations have avoided training users on productivity tools (like Microsoft Office) and "groupware" (like Lotus Notes). However, clearly accessibility is another reason to invest in providing this kind of support to users but it will require as much of a mind shift as the commitment to delivering technically accessible Web tools.
Of course, the one elephant in the room that this report doesn't address is if there are a more accessible tools available. Ignoring the specific issue of accessibility, technical governance of SharePoint remains a massive issue for many organisations yet you won't be compliant without customisation.
For a successful SharePoint implementation, you can’t forget the most important ingredient — getting the platform used.
If you are reading this article, it is likely because you’ve heard whining in your office or you’re tired of repeating the same message over and over to improve user adoption of your SharePoint implementation.
You may be a frustrated project manager or business champion who spent countless hours on budgeting, planning, governance, information architecture, training and timelines, only to find that the last task in your SharePoint project plan that has no due date is USER ADOPTION. And to your horror, no one is taking your words seriously and people don’t care. The bottom line is this: for you to get people to take advantage of your hard work, you have to add one more task assigned to yourself — don’t give up.
Unfortunately if thinking about "user adoption" is the last step, then you've already failed. Written by a software vendor, this article - underpinned by an assumption that the software is perfect - advises people to Break Down the Resistance, Stop the Whining and then Babysit, aka Enforce change. This approach is more than overtly paternalistic and I'm surprised they don't just recommend getting rid of the users who are blemishing the hard work of the technocrats. Part of me wonders if this attitude is just symptomatic of the Microsoft SharePoint ecosystem being geared towards software development and implementation, rather than a well rounded mix of people, process, technology and content (like we do at Headshift | Dachis Group). What do you think?
“SharePoint forms the heart of our social networking capabilities within Accenture,” says Crawford, “We use it as a content management system, a publishing platform and for internal communications.”
Corporate Demographics
Social Demographics
230,000 employees
SharePoint 2010 platform with NewsGator add in for Social
Located in 120 countries
Yammer for microblogging
$25 billion in annual revenues
115,000 employees have filled out profiles
Headquarters in Ireland
5000 profile updates a month
CEO: Pierre Nanterme 1000 blog posts a month
12,000 video items posted to Accenture Media Exchange
4200+ monthly microblog updates
Accenture’s social business initiative also includes a broad based video strategy. Starting with Cisco’s Telepresence at the high-end and desktop video at the low end.
Good timing with this post from Mark Fidelman, since I've been talking about Deloitte's experience with SharePoint, Newsgator and Yammer and enterprise microblogging in general. Its not entirely clear how the complete stack described above is working together at Accenture, however they clearly see value in both tools.
Following on from my post about Deloitte's contradictory experiences of using both Yammer and Microsoft Sharepoint, it begs the question - what enterprise social business software should you be using?
In the video above, CIO's from two companies, Equinix and Flextronic, talk about this issue. The approach taken by Flextronic - who employ 200,000 employees in 30 countries - is a combination of open infrastructure and experimentation, using small pilots. This exact approach won't work for everyone, but if we boil this down to a core idea that everyone can apply, then I would recommend a design thinking led approach:
In this interview, Jive's CEO Tony Zingale provides some good inputs into this design process:
So what do built from the ground up social business tools look like? Here is a good overview from tibbr:
As the tibbr video shows, social business tools can integrate with existing enterprise information systems (systems of record). In your organisation, this might include existing information management platforms like Sharepoint:
We also need to support other simple 'social' business activities needed by users, for example calendars and scheduling etc:
Also, pick tools that allow us to 'nudge' users, rather than forcing change:
Consider all these points and you should find that users love the tools you provide them...
BTW If you are interested in some theory behind these examples, see my presentation, Architected for Collaboration, and my post on Designing Social Workplaces.
Watching the twitter stream from #KMAUS this year, I noticed a lot of tweets about technology and particularly issues that sounded very much like Enterprise 2.0 or Social Business conversations taking place.
One of the comments that caught my attention was blogged about by Brad Hinton in more detail:
Pete Williams from Deloitte emphasised how existing communication tools can be used for good business outcomes. He was specifically focusing on social tools that allow connection and collaboration between individuals and teams. He informed us how Deloitte uses Yammer to share information and experiences within Deloitte. He gave many examples as to how the system was used to ask and solve problems; problems that might otherwise take much longer to solve or deal with. In a telling point about Sharepoint, Williams said this about the Microsoft product: “if I want to get a glass of water, Sharepoint wants to dig a well. Why not go to the tap that’s already there?”.
Brad also highlighted the cultural environment (a "can do" culture) that goes hand-in-hand with the ability to successfully use tools like Yammer, although I would point to case studies from organisations in other industries, such as government and utilities, that show they can work elsewhere too. So tools like Yammer, Socialcast, tibbr, Socialtext and the like are in no way something restricted to technology and consulting firms, although in practice we find how they are used is different to pure 'knowledge work' businesses.
However, Deloitte is a large company (~170,000 staff around the world) and its interesting to consider that while one part of Deloitte sees Sharepoint as overkill, another part has successfully deployed a social intranet based on Microsoft Sharepoint. Called D Street, it uses a combination of Sharepoint and Newsgator.
Some of the recommendations Deloitte make from this experience are that:
Deloitte have published a more detailed case study (PDF). Its also interesting to look at how they use Sharepoint from a technical perspective (integration with SAP, architected to support 50,000 users).
Looking at both experiences within Deloitte, I don't think either is more valid than the other. Rather it highlights the importance of designing solutions that fit the needs of users and take into account the particular circumstances of each organisation (or part of the organisation implementing them). Unfortunately, there is no single right fit or approach. And both Sharepoint and tools like Yammer can be used well or badly.
Image source: Newsgator.
With its office based and field staff all over the state, McIntyre is striving to improve communications with the public and the employees of TransGrid through social media and internal communications. One of the tools he will be using to communicate directly with employees is the newly developed and region specific intranet site “The Wire”. He also participates in regular graduate and company wide forums using online tools like Yammer. Here, McIntyre updates employees directly with any TransGrid related news and listens to his staff’s feedback as they share their thoughts organisational policies and industry issues. This creates a corporate culture of inclusion, along with internal polling of high employee satisfaction and a very low turnover rate – it would seem that TransGrid is one of Australia’s best employers.
Mentioned in a general article about TransGrid, who own and operate the high voltage electricity transmission network in the Australian state of New South Wales, is a great example of how even industrial organisations like this (i.e. not an IT or consulting company) benefit from the use of enterprise social computing. In this case they use a combination of Yammer and an intranet, which I believe is based on Microsoft SharePoint.
We’ve recently profiled MITRE’s social networking site, “Handshake,” as one of the best that we’ve seen. The name “Handshake” alone conveys the intention of MITRE to create an online experience that mimics those we have in person. CEC members, you can dive deeper into the case study and learn why it works better than your average SharePoint MySite or other clunky technologies.
Interesting comment, on a post about how MITRE measures the impact of its internal social nework. I've blogged about it before, as like Broadvision's Clearvale platform it also runs on Elgg.
Unfortunately the detail for this comment is behind a membership paywall, but based on my experience of Elgg and SharePoint I would caution against assuming this means Elgg is better than SharePoint as a whole. Elgg's architecture is built around people primarily, where as SharePoint is built around information and data. The nuances are important and could well justify the original comment, but not against either platform being better than the other.
In the May-June 2011 edition of IDM magazine (I've written for them too in the past), I've just enjoyed reading Ishai Sagi's article on empowering users with SharePoint 2010 using what he calls an "evolutionary approach" (what some of us would say is actually about supporting emergence). This is one where IT allows users more scope to build their own solutions (in SharePoint, of course) but with some oversight and expert advice when necessary.
Sagi's has observed - like me and many others - the way that users make use of relatively simple desktop tools, like Excel and Access to build their own business tools. In fact, we might claim that spreadsheets are the original Enterprise 2.0 tool. The software risks of doing this haven't gone unnoticed over the years either, but user needs typically wins out when IT can't deliver.
Sagi concludes that the shift to a Darwinian model is scary for IT department and ultimately this is the challenge I've observed with SharePoint over the years. There is no doubt that SharePoint 2010 is a massive improvement on previous releases, but I'm a little unconvinced about applying an evolutionary approach to large, vanilla SharePoint deployments. In fact, Sagi hints at the role of 3rd part products to make the evolutionary approach easier.
I think Sagi is on the right track as being one of the few SharePoint evangelists I've come across who recognise the importance of building human-centred information systems and adopting an IT abundance mindset. For that, I welcome him warmly to the conversation, but I think he is still very much in the minority in the SharePoint and intranet community. And since the door has been opened, if you need 3rd party plugins to make SharePoint work effectively in this model then maybe a better approach is to treat SharePoint as a capability layer, as Lee suggests.
What do you think?
Image credit: lego desktop wallpaper CC BY-NC
