Author: Lee Reed

Implementing SharePoint in the flow of business means that SharePoint’s capabilities and your user’s needs meet at right time and the right place.  For users to adopt SharePoint, these capabilities must meet the user where they are; meaning that they must provide the power that’s needed to solve the user’s current challenge while also being easy enough for the user to understand and implement.  When SharePoint is implemented outside of the flow of business, user adoption will suffer and your user community will feel like they’re ‘pushing a rope’.

Implementing SharePoint ‘Above the Flow’ = Read-Only Intranet

When you implement SharePoint above the flow of business you risk implementing a Read-only intranet, otherwise known as ‘Brochure-ware’.  An environment implemented above the flow of business doesn’t allow people to contribute their knowledge, thoughts or special skills to the information stored within SharePoint.  Often, departmental intranets are implemented above the flow and as they are meant to provide access to informational announcements, forms and other information unique to a department or business goal.  This environment does not allow users to post information or provide their input as this function is managed and locked-down by departmental gate keepers.  When you implement SharePoint above the flow of work, you’re users will never use the system’s powerful collaboration functions and will only interact with the site when they are required to do so.

Implementing SharePoint ‘Below the Flow’ = Existing Business Silos

When you implement SharePoint below the flow of business you are mimicking the existing business silos.  Instead of increasing access to corporate data you are focused on locking down access to information so that departments aren’t able to even interact with one another.  This does nothing to increase user’s access to important information.  If you are spending more time focused on what things people should not have access to or recording what permissions should be applied to particular sets of documents then you’re focused on the wrong things and are implementing SharePoint below the flow of business.  SharePoint’s power is unlocked when it assists to socialize information.  A SharePoint environment implemented in this way often causes frustration because information that’s needed is in some other area of SharePoint with unique permissions applied.

Implementing SharePoint ‘In the Flow’ means….

When you implement SharePoint in the flow of business your meeting users where they are in their business lives and are giving them capabilities that increase their efficiency.  When you implement SharePoint in the flow, you know almost immediately because people accept what has been rolled out and are asking for information to push their use of the environment further and faster than you anticipated.  You also know because sites will be enhanced rapidly, questions that the end-users ask will get increasingly complex and departments will begin to talk about SharePoint’s capabilities in their departmental meetings with regards to how SharePoint can solve their business challenges.  When your coworkers begin to make statements similar to, ”How could we have ever done this without SharePoint?”, you know that SharePoint will be successful in your organization.

In Conclusion…

SharePoint is all about user adoption.  The best technical SharePoint implementation in the world simply won’t be used and leveraged if user adoption is not focused upon and if users aren’t made to feel comfortable within the environment.  Supporting your users as they begin to use SharePoint and as they start their journey from a world of ‘information comes to me via e-mail’ to the world of ‘I can contribute information to a site for the common good’ is one that takes time, patience and education.  There is no magic bullet for user adoption, and not every department will adopt this technology at the same pace, but you must foster your user’s adoption of SharePoint.  While it takes a lot of effort to do all of the items mentioned above, know that it generally only takes 4 or 5 significant success stories to be socialized within your company for people to beat a path to your door asking for more information.

Author: Lee Reed

Lee is a SharePoint Consultant in Atlanta, GA and has held technology leadership positions in the healthcare, commercial real estate, multifamily, consulting and legal industries. He is laser focused on assisting companies to leverage their technology investments with a driving passion around demystifying technology to drive collaboration success.