Don’t settle for the lowest common denominator
Why SharePoint may be the wrong tool for all your communication and collaboration needs.
The origins of this thought bubble
Last year, I joined a self-formed collaborative group who tasked themselves with identifying how to significantly lift the organisations communication and collaborative nervous system.
In the context of rapid change in strategies, goals and people and geographical dispersion across Australia, the status-quo was clearly impacted the ability of our business to achieve it’s goals.
The organisation made use of a mix of email, an old very creaky Intranet, and a newly built corporate communications web site that consisted links, news and executive blogs running on a Oracle platform.
This latter effort had set back the cause of investment in resolving the current situation. The project ran out of cash and stakeholder patience. When the vast wave of money receded, only a simple Wordpress-like site was left — possibly the most expensive $/intranet page metric the world has seen.
How we set about to solve the challenge
We started by asking what key jobs people within our organisation were performing could be significantly impacted by a increasing our digital communication and collaboration capabilities.
We quickly realised that there was no one-sized fits all solution — in fact such a goal might be counter-productive. Editing content meant very different things if you were managing corporate communications, co-authoring technical requirements or working on a sales forecast.
The problem was that at the macro-level you could easily made the mistake that every team and every process had the same needs.
This mistake seems to be made consistently by projects where a well meaning IT Architect places a “logical” box on a page and then believes whenever he hears that word that the single box can address everyone’s needs.
Unfortunately it the real world, it rarely turns out to be true.
To communicate that this was a false belief we constructed a matrix of specific needs across the key teams we spoke to. This matrix articulated the unique outcomes even when the job seemed to be similar.
On the X axes we had what looked like common processes such as sharing knowledge, communications with stakeholders external to a team, task collaboration, team conversations.
On the Y axes we had teams we talked to including Corporate Communications, Software Delivery, Customer Service, Marketing, Human Resources, Compliance.
Viewers of the matrix quickly realised that a single platform to solve everyone’s needs to their satisfaction would be either immensely expensive or immensely unsatisfying to all involved.
The approach we recommended
First get a solution for company wide engagement and then address logical segments within your organisation who have related needs organised around specific outcomes or information.
Company wide engagement
Every individual, team, project and organisational unit has information that is wants everyone else in the company to know. Often they use a Corporate Communications team to get this job done. Think of this as internal marketing — measured both on awareness and desirability
These communications are carefully constructed and often go through a review process — whether it is an executive blog or the page providing information about a specific project.
The key requirement for any technology used for this purpose is that it has to be accessible by everyone considered part of the organisation. This is often the domain of the traditional Intranet.
Engagement has broadened beyond one-way static publishing and now includes ability to handle questions, comments and help orchestrate the flow of information.
The fact is most Enterprise Social Networking products are terrible at this use case. They do not have a persistent navigation structure which is easy to understand. They do not have the concept of content review and visual and engaging content is a second class citizen to short notifications.
There are three types of solutions that address this need. The default for most organisations where the IT department makes the choices is SharePoint if your a Microsoft shop or an IBM product for those rare IBM shops.
It is quite possible to get SharePoint to fulfil this requirement, but it takes significant additional development.
Of all the consultancies who can deliver that result, I have a particular soft spot for the work of BrightStarr.
However, these solutions do not come cheap. The fact is that you are buying a lot of custom development to turn a generic development and web portal platform into an Intranet that suits your needs.
An alternative, and frankly, our preferred choice was to acquire a purpose built Intranet solution. A solution that was very clear about what it was trying to achieve and optimised for that purpose.
Two examples in this category are Jostle.me and Interact-Intranet . Both are purpose built for this use-case. Interact-Intranet has a longer history (especially in the UK), but Jostle.me is tailored to a more tech-savvy audience and the way it deals with dynamic and flexible organisational structures is light years ahead of the alternatives.
The third choice, and where we started, was to adapt social enterprise solutions from firms such as Jive. Like Socialcast, Yammer and a dozen other contenders these tools took their cues from FaceBook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Jive was worthwhile exploring. In areas like their built-in impact analytics they are showing how well an execution can be done. Unfortunately, we felt it was cumbersome in how it addressed corporate communications.
Along with its brethren, straddling a difficult divide between trying to be part of your day-to-day job and acting as that generic organisational nervous systems.
Shared need segments within the Business
We found that each area of the business had very specific requirements and each organisation would need to make a decision about where specialisation makes sense.
For example if 80% of communications within Product Delivery are internal to that team. When they are doing their day-to-day work, it makes sense to let them specialise and every so often they dip into the broader communications ecosystem to see what is going on in the company. The same goes with the sales & marketing teams.
Often these conversations and collaboration are based around their units of work. In Product Delivery and Technology it is Requirements, Technology Artefacts and Issues. In Sales, Marketing and Service is it is often the Leads, Customers and Opportunities.
That is why we made the decision to leverage a purpose built communication and collaboration technology for intra-team communication that focuses on teams getting their day jobs done effectively and efficiently. Generally this technology is integration with the wide variety of tools that these people use to get their job done.
In engaging a customer from a Product Management and Delivery teams perspective I outline how these ecosystems tie together. In this latest analysis I recommended Flowdock.
For sales teams it makes sense to use something like Salesforce Chatter or if that is not available, then make use of any social and collaboration tool that can integrate with the environment in which customers are sold to and serviced.
Chatter, for all it’s weaknesses as a general enterprise tool, is optimised for a sales team’s context. If they want to share a marketing win it is not hard to prepare the communication content for publishing in the company wide communication channel.
General document storage and collaboration
The fact is that many parts of your business do not live inside applications. The written document, spreadsheets and presentations are still a fact of live. Most organisations are going to use either Google or Microsoft to satisfy this need. Both also include presence awareness into the equation.
Historically it has been far easier to find other solutions which integrate with the Google ecosystem. Providing streamlined access to a Google Drive and Mail from within other platforms.
Microsoft is catching up. Either platform will do the job. Your preference will depend on the cost of change in training your staff, your existing set of tools, interoperability of content with outside firms and many other factors.
Some choose to switch-out Microsoft’s collaborative storage, editing and communication layer for non-Microsoft technologies for those offered by Jive, Dropbox and others. Microsoft has left open that market because their own implementation is generally unintuitive, and often has significant bugs even in production releases — a fact best captured in this review.
I really hope Microsoft can improve their execution. The fact left to their own devices I know few people outside a large enteprise who don’t turn to Google first and only use Microsoft where they have to work with a their larger brethren.
Either way these communication, task and collaboration systems should be focused on what they are good at, helping people co-author and review a general purpose office file.
Key success factors
The best technology choices make no difference if you don’t address the implementation and people side. The fact is building effective communities is difficult. Every credible vendor we spoke to made sure to emphasise the following:
Collect metrics
If you don’t know how you are performing today, you have no way of validating the investment and focusing on areas of improvement. Exactly how many of your staff are engaging with content, how long are they reading for? Not just at a macro-view, but by area of your organisation.
The metrics can be focused on specific outcomes, such as understanding of vision and culture — not just usage.
Make a team accountable and visible for success
The fact is both for your company-wide effort and for each the tailored solutions you will need champions who feel it is their job to make the service a success. Call them Product Owners, Evangalists or just Community Managers. These people are essential to monitoring content, identifying areas for improvement and resolving issues quickly.