Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

A New Chapter -- KMA and Sentri

"Even in the perfect world where everyone was equal
I still would own the portal and be working on the SQL."

-- Elvis Costello, "Every Day I Write the Book," with geek liberties taken

I'm excited to announce a new chapter in the direction of the team I've have the good fortune to work with for the last several (nearly six) years, and in my career:  KMA has sold its SharePoint practice to Sentri, Inc.

Starting today, Monday 13 February 2012, I'll be Sentri's General Manager of Strategic Services, with responsibility for Sentri's SharePoint and CRM practice areas. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to build upon what I've spent the past twelve years doing: helping business decision makers improve organizational performance using Microsoft business productivity technologies.

In addition to a strong existing SharePoint practice, Sentri has world-class capabilities around Microsoft core infrastructure and application platform technologies, so the combination of breadth and depth from Sentri and KMA is truly exciting.

When I take stock of where we are and how we've gotten here, I am thankful for the following:

• the time, capital, and wisdom invested in the SharePoint practice by KMA's founders Jorge Rodriguez and David Goldstein. I've learned an incredible amount from them over our time working together.
• the counsel, ideas and support of my business partner Jean Tufts and former colleagues such as Chris McNulty, Sadie Van Buren, Florin Muntean, James Henry, Sean Megley, Liz Hatch, and many others. Their ability to generate great ideas and execute on them with clients was the foundation for much of what we currently are, and they all pushed me to be better than I would have been otherwise.
• the clients and community members who provided constructive accountability as they learned alongside us over several generations of SharePoint product releases.
• the Managed Partner team at Microsoft, including world-class PAM Barrie Mirman, who now has one less partner to manage, and whose insight, energy, focus and commitment are unparalleled anywhere I've seen in Microsoft in my twelve years as a partner.
• the SharePoint community, who has embraced our thought leadership and given us a stage on which to tell our story.
• last but not least, I am thankful for the passion, commitment. and collegiality of KMA's SharePoint team, with whom I look forward to writing the next chapters in this story.

Expect to see more frequent updates via this medium now that the deal is done. It's early in this book, and there are many more chapters to be written. 

SharePoint Saturday Philly -- Recap and Presentation

I had an absolute blast presenting "A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Strategies" at SharePoint Saturday Philly this past weekend.  In addition to the usual friendly, motley band of itinerant SharePoint speakers from various ISVs and consultancies, there were several hundred attendees (about 450 overall). 

As one would expect from a group of people freely giving up their Saturday to learn about SharePoint, folks were engaged and enthusiastic about the subject matter, and my session was full of questions, cross-talk, and attendees sharing their ideas, successes, and challenges.  Their participation certainly made the 75 minutes fly by, and the conversations continued into the hallway and beyond.

I'd like to send a public shout-out to Mike Mukalian, David Mann, and the rest of the organizers, to Chris McNulty, who co-authored the presentation with me when we presented it at SharePoint Saturday - The Conference (DC) last summer, and to Sentri's Jason Himmelstein, with whom I drove down and who filled my brain with many great ideas about future presentation content.

The slides are here: 

A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Best Practices

View more PowerPoint from Mike Gilronan

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 6 (Expert Best Practices)

The second “Best Practices” type of session I attended was SPC245, “Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability” presented by Jornata’s Scott Jamison.  Although he is a principal at a competitor, he is also a top-notch presenter, and I always enjoy and get value from Scott’s presentations.

Clearly vying for the title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” Scott, in his third presentation of the day, blitzed through many specific, practical tips on how to make SharePoint more usable and information more findable, including the following highlights:

• Folders (great for contributors, especially incumbents who have a general sense of where things belong via “tribal knowledge”) vs metadata (great for consumers who understand metadata, but can be tedious for contributors if they have to tag content manually).   One key “Go Do” item Scott frequently advises is to create separate user experiences (via default views) for contributors vs consumers.
• Improving search results by paying attention to how things are named (especially the critical “Title” field) and where stored (e.g., the fewer slashes in the path, the higher-ranked in search)
• Improving search results by measuring their effectiveness with out-of-the-box reports from SharePoint:  search queries that returned no results or no best bets.
• Changing default navigation in simple but effective ways like getting rid of the default left-hand navigation where it works counter to how users will find their way through a portal.

All of the techniques that Scott related were in response to common user challenges that each of us has seen “in the wild,” and they were crisply and artfully presented. 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 1 (Monday Keynotes)

This week, I was fortunate to attend Microsoft's SharePoint Conference (SPC) in Anaheim, CA, and to meet and learn from some of the most talented SharePoint people in the world.  I’m summarizing some key take-aways from the conference via a series of blog articles.

The conference opened with keynotes by Microsoft’s Jared Spataro, Jeff Teper, and Kurt  Del Bene. There were approximately 7,500 users in attendance, many of them passionate advocates for SharePoint.   

 
Perhaps I’ve been jaded by 5 Worldwide Partner Conferences and other events such as Convergence and past SharePoint Conferences, but I wake up early to get to keynotes in order to hear the words “We are pleased to announce…” followed by a momentous announcement.  As Microsoft was disinclined to discuss the next version of Office and SharePoint, there were few momentous announcements in the keynotes, and most attendees I spoke to said the same. 

These keynotes were generally celebratory in tone, including such data points as:

• 125 million licenses of SharePoint in use at over 65,000 customers
• 67% of all enterprise customers have rolled out SharePoint to everyone in their enterprise

For me, the highlight of the keynote, however, was a demo of the failover capabilities of the newest version of SQL Server, code-named “Denali,” which entailed a helpful assistant taking down a server (literally unplugging the network cable from a giant rack of servers/storage on-stage, pictured here with my colleague Deanne), then watching an enormous SharePoint 2010 content database running on Denali under an enormous workload (7,500 concurrent users, a 14 TB content database, 107 million records in search results) recover from this total failover in about 40 seconds – a remarkable feat of high availability.

The rest of the keynote was organized around three main themes:

Re-defining collaboration:  It’s not too hard to argue that the prevalence of SharePoint in many organizations has changed the way workers collaborate over the last ten years, and a nod was given to the future in the form of a discussion about self-service business intelligence redefining and democratizing BI in the same way (data in SQL, presentation via SharePoint, analysis in Excel).

A rich ecosystem:  The explosion of SharePoint adoption has been a boon to many system integrator and ISV partners, as well as to Microsoft.  Given that, if SharePoint were its own company, it would still be one of the 50 largest software companies in the world, and the heuristic that each dollar of SharePoint licensing generally begets $8-10 in services revenue, it is no small wonder that the shortage of SharePoint talent is top of mind for every SharePoint partner I spoke to.

An end-to-end platform:  Microsoft has continually improved their story about both host (on-premises, hybrid, third-party host, or Microsoft cloud) and client (PC, tablet, phone) options for SharePoint.

No jaw-dropping product announcements, just good solid “blocking and tackling” for a mature, enterprise-class platform which, perhaps, is what Microsoft wanted us to take away.

Other announcements of note:

• The next (due Q4, CY2011, if I heard correctly) version of Office 365 will support read/write integration with external data sources using Business Connectivity Services 
• A new, elite-level SharePoint certification:  Microsoft Certified Architect
• A great template from Microsoft’s Visio team documenting a SharePoint farm topology automatically, with gorgeous Visio-based graphics. 

 

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, part 2: The Revolution Will Be Recorded

Each year, I attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to get some visibility into where social and collaboration technologies are headed.  I attended the keynote speeches Tuesday, comprising eight presentations of 15 minutes each delivered rapid-fire style.  This post is the second of what I expect to be three "echoes" from these keynotes.

Among the most interesting keynote presentations was "Managing People and Process Across A Networked Organization" by Jim Grubb, VP, Corporate Communications Architecture, Chief Demonstration Officer [note: what a great title!], Cisco Systems, Inc., who detailed Cisco's vision for collaboration. Jim discussed the fusion of synchronous collaboration (e.g., voice communications, and live + virtual meetings where parties are interacting with one another in real-time) and asynchronous collaboration (tools and techniques we more frequently associate with Enterprise 2.0, e.g., wikis, blogs, document-level collaboration tools, etc.).

The most interesting, and I dare say chilling, aspect of the keynote was a vision of a world where voice communications can be integrated with asynchronous collaboration tools using the following scenario:

• A meeting, either live or remote, is convened.
• The meeting is recorded for future usage ("we have so many meetings in part because we don't remember what we discussed")
• The meeting proceedings are transcribed, indexed, and stored.
• Meeting proceedings can be searched from collaboration workspaces and portals.

This scenario made me think about the potentially chilling effect of the recording on meeting participation and the free-wheeling, thinking-out-loud, spitballing, serendipitous style of collaboration so important to innovation and the creation of new ideas. This free exchange of ideas between people (also sometimes known as "Ideas Having Sex") is absolutely critical to trust.

If I knew that all of my participation in meetings and conference calls would be recorded, indexed, and forever searchable, I know that I would be far more judicious in what I said, especially in internal conversations.  Perhaps we would get used to it the same way that we are used to being videotaped by ubiquitous surveillance cameras today, or recorded on customer service phone lines, but people at Enterprise 2.0 with whom I chatted about this idea (including one who knows a lot about e-discovery) shared my initial, chilled impression about the potential unintended consequences.

How we manage, culturally, to bridge the inherent conflict between the need to find and record the fruits of our information workers' labors and the need to provide safe places where colleagues can freely share ideas, even bad ones, will be fascinating to watch over the next several years, and will be critical to our success as information workers and knowledge managers. 

How are you planning on balancing these conflicting needs in your organization?

Semantic Taint: Don’t Talk About SharePoint!

I'm reading a GREAT book that's a compilation of articles from the acclaimed journal for word lovers called "Verbatim," (note: link is to the mostly defunct web site) and am really enjoying the linguistic gymnastics that skilled writers have created for my entertainment. 

The latest article I read appears to have been originally published (per this blog) in 1986, and it introduces me to the term "semantic taint." 

Semantic taint is the phenomenon of a word inheriting a "distinctive coloring" (usually negative, sometimes scatalogical or sexual) due to its association with other words.  Some examples include:

• appeasement (forever associated with Munich, and not in a good way)
• diaphragm (there's a great Steve Martin bit about this that I'll leave it to you to find)
• erection (for my friends in construction, of course), etc.

I think that the word "SharePoint" is a dangerous word to use when talking about and building support among business stakeholders for a new collaboration toolset, intranet, extranet, portal, knowledge management system, or digital workplace.  It could either be a foreign, techie-sounding word, or could evoke a technology project from days/years past (hint:  most of these fail -- you know this, right?). Now, SharePoint is a wonderful set of technologies, blessed with phenomenal adoption, a great partner ecosystem, and one of the absolute dominant players in the software world behind it.  It, in many cases, is inevitable.  But, if you are defining your project in terms if SharePoint, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

As many of the speakers discussed at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, start with the business value ("we will create and publish content more efficiently," "we will build a workspace where we can collaborate on documents and other content with our partners," etc.), decide on a platform, and CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE.

“Our SharePoint initiative” conjures images of an IT-driven technology-centric project, while most potential users of SharePoint have never heard of it, and (rightfully) will not care a whit about it unless they understand first how it will make THEIR jobs easier, and THEIR lives better. (Think:  "What's in it for me?")

This is 100-level stuff, but it's both validating (in our jobs as SharePoint consultants) and aggravating to see the same mistakes time and time again.  So, rather than “our SharePoint initiative,” or “the portal,” consider such examples as:

KMANet  -- OK, this one is not super-inventive, but at least it is about the organization, not the technology.  And, it's succinct, which is always important.

Cramerville  -- By, of, and for “creatives” at a top interactive agency, and those who support them.  Great name for a family-owned business with a strong sense of community and great internal brand.

Shmoogle  -- Perhaps not the most Microsoft-friendly, but it’s about the client, not the software, and it evokes a place to go to learn/know everything about the organization and they, a Jewish philanthropic organization, got a kick out of it.

Better yet, make it your choice of business-relevant, user-selected, and fun/memorable title.  Some great resources on this topic are:

• Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper,
• The Nielsen Norman Group's annual report on best intranets
• The Intranet Benchmarking Forum
• Your local SharePoint Saturday, in the end-user track.

If all else fails, remember the first rule of Fight Club (hover over link if you don't remember)!

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, Part 1: Don't Re-Tweet the Revolution

Among the highlights of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston were the keynote presentations.  The keynotes are always a high point of the conference, and this year’s were remarkable because of the size, complexity, and sophistication of the organizations represented (e.g., Microsoft, Deutche Bank, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Avaya, etc.) , and the expertise of the presenters themselves.

One presentation I found compelling was that of John Stepper, a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.  John’s theme was “Stop Evangelizing, Start Doing,” and he echoed a central theme of this year’s conference:  BUSINESS VALUE.

One of the sub-themes that resonated with me was the business challenge: “Help me get through compliance,” a common lament of workers in organizations with strict compliance requirements. Compliance adds cost, time, and hassle to many business processes, often because workers aren’t aware of what the compliance group needs from them.  Not surprisingly, this theme has a corollary from compliance workers:  “Help us avoid surprises.”

Social computing at Deutsche Bank transformed compliance processes by making them more transparent, resulting in:

• simpler processes (internal “customers” can help refine processes that they can see and understand), and
• better-qualified projects (with compliance requirements and processes highly visible, higher quality submissions were received, resulting in a reduction of costly iteration/re-submission).

In providing this and other examples of the commercial benefit of social technology within Deutsche Bank, John showed real business transformation and encouraged the audience to seek similar opportunities within their own organization.  Rather than working from a script of best practices, seek out high-value opportunities that are relevant to you.  Or, as he more succinctly put it: 

“Don’t just re-tweet the revolution – start your own.  Change the work!”

[of course, like 50 people in attendance re-tweeted this pithy remark, some more ironically than others]

One additional note on form:  John also benefited from a slide deck that was as simple as it was beautiful, rooted in the Presentation Zen philosophy.  I'll post or tweet a link if I see the deck posted.

The Cobbler's Kids

"But who is wurs shod, than the shoemakers wyfe, With shops full of newe shapen shoes all hir lyfe?"  -- J. Heywood, Dialogue of Proverbs, c. 1546.  via answers.com

You often will hear consultants sheepishly refer to themselves as "the cobbler's kids" (who legendarily go without shoes) when it comes to their organization's business systems and practices, and I've had lively discussions with colleagues over the years about how we need to model the types of behavior we encourage our clients to invest in.

It's an excellent question to consider:  in light of the size and type of firm that we want to be, what's the right level of investment in the types of collaboration, insight, and productivity solutions we help our clients implement, not to mention other operational and administrative functions?

In addition to the voluminous ideas for improvement that my colleagues and I tend to generate (hey, we're consultants!), here are a few things to consider:

1. The "table stakes" or "meets minimum" approach. In some non-strategic areas, we must consider the minimum we can invest without creating an uncomfortable client or associate experience.  While it may not differentiate us competitively to generate beautifully formatted invoices with a minimum of automation, our invoices do need to be timely and accurate.  If we fail to meet this basic standard, we run the risk of hearing from our clients what I recently heard directed to a CIO in a story:  "If you can't run your business well, why would I let you anywhere near mine?"
2. Direct client feedback.  If we create opportunities to listen to our clients (face-to-face meetings, social media interactions, surveys), we are privileged to learn directly from them what they need, whether it's new offerings such as post-deployment SharePoint administration services, or improving the client experience via secure extranets where we can collaborate together on project documentation.
3. External benchmarks.  We're fortunate to be part of a program Microsoft has developed for key partners called "Partner Builder," where they guide us through a self-assessment of our capabilities along a maturity model, across a series of business operations.  Although it would be improved by a report showing us how we compare to peers around the world, it is a useful exercise that helps KMA assess our capabilities, and will serve as a good input for strategic discussions going forward.

There are many places where you can invest in your business, especially in a small services business, but if you balance your natural "consultant-y" problem-solving orientation with these factors, you should be well-shod for years to come.

[Flickr photo:  "shoe repair man" by dmahendra, used under Creative Commons license] 

 

Social Computing Served Three Ways

In the most recent season of "Top Chef All-Stars," eventual winner Richard Blais liked to present one ingredient in three ways, to show off all of its flavors.  In his honor, I present to you my own trio of delights. His were culinary, mine are centered around social computing, as my expertise is in working environments far less noisy and hot than his.  Hopefully, my output will be similarly tasty, if only because three is a magic number.

Lask week, I was privileged to attend a program at the Center for Information Management Studies (CIMS) at Babson College:  "Enterprise 2.0, Social Software and Collaboration."  The program featured three excellent presentations on the theme:

Noted author Paul Gillin's session about "the quiet revolution behind the firewall," where he guided us through ten key business benefits of social media.  The single best insight I got from this session was a quote from Kartik Hisanagar, professor of operations and information management at University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business:

"Today, social networking is being thought of as a separate thing.  We'll see that fade over time, and it will become just part of the way we interact."

Source:  "Is Business-centric Social Networking a Revolution -- or a Ruse?", Knowledge@Wharton

The second session had a more academic slant to it.  Professors PJ Guinan and Sal Parise reviewed their recent research.  They performed over 70 interviews with social media practitioners at 50 large companies about "corporate culture and social media strategy development,"  and discerned four major strategies. The results of their research are soon to be published in the Harvard Business Review, and I recommend looking out for it as a good guide to assessing your organization's social media strategy relative to size, tolerance for risk, constraints and opportunities.

The third and final session I attended blended corporate and academic themes, as Stephen Laster, CIO of Harvard Business School, presented on the topic of "enabling the social generation" and customizing the enterprise's response to them. He related the broad themes of convergence, consumerization, crowd-sourcing, and how "digital natives" use social tools to research, collaborate, produce and leverage content in new ways.  He then proposed ways CIOs can engage these users and enable the future workforce, which broke down into:

1.  Understand the possibilities (not just the risks!). 
2.  Partner to prioritize, and listen to the business.
3.  Deliver with excellence:  on time, on quality, and on budget.

The CIMS event was the first of a flurry of upcoming events tied to the theme of social computing, including:

SharePoint Saturday Boston (April 9th at Microsoft's Waltham office), where there's always a good assortment of content about social computing in SharePoint.

The SIM (Society for Information Management) CIO panel on social computing, April 14 at the Needham Sheraton.

Last but not least, KMA's April webinar with NewsGator on April 20, where we'll explore social computing capabilities native to SharePoint 2010 and how NewsGator Social Sites can help take enterprise social computing to the next level.

I hope to see you at these events!  Stay social!

People Leave. Does Their Knowledge Go With Them?

I'm probably not going to ruffle a lot of feathers by asserting that the days of "thirty years and a gold watch from the same employer" are over.

 
[flickr photo credit:  "Carla Carpenter Retirement Party" by grantlairdjr:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/grantlairdjr/1804423/in/photostream/]

Attrition is a fact of life, and the dialogue at a recent meeting of the Boston SIKM (System Integrators and Knowledge Managers) Leaders group made me think about knowledge management and attrition, so I did some research and learned:

• The average member of the U.S. workforce will have 11 jobs between the ages of 18 and 44.
• Among jobs started by 39- to 44-year olds, 33 percent ended in less than a year and 68 percent ended in fewer than 5 years.
• The annual separation rates for both information work and financial work is roughly one in three over the past decade.

Plenty has been written about the graying of the U.S. workforce, and how this macro trend will only exacerbate the problem. 

Unlike our government's executive branch, with a well-defined time between election and inauguration telling them precisely how much time they have for transition, we in the commercial sector know not the day nor the hour of many transitions.  The potential exists for HUGE loss of knowledge assets as aging workers leave the workforce in planned (retirement) or worse, unplanned (health issues) ways.

So, are you convinced yet that you, as a steward of an organization, a team, or a pile of knowledge, are standing on a platform burning up from attrition?  How, then, do we help build "orderly transitions" of power and information?

The answers are right in front of us, effective and simple to the point of being boring:  Knowledge management systems comprised of people, process and tools.  More specifically, here are some excellent questions to ask yourself, as you think late at night about your organization (or department or project), if the risk of key persons leaving your team keeps you counting ceiling tiles:

People:  What are the competencies and characteristics for which we hire?  How do we assimilate new people to the organization?  How are training requests created and prioritized? How do we promote both formal and informal mentoring from both the supply and demand side?

Process:  What is your organization's knowledge infrastructure like?  Do you have common definitions, processes, and focus?   Is the harvest of knowledge assets built into day-to-day activities?

Tools:  Do you have centralized, searchable repositories of knowledge that are integrated into your core business processes?

Beware the consultant who promotes one of these facets at the expense of the others ("SharePoint solves this problem!"  "What you need is our unique KM methodology!" etc.). There are literally hundreds more questions you can ask yourself about your own knowledge management system based on the people/process/tools framework, but the framework provides a useful prism through which to look at areas of business at risk of knowledge loss through attrition. 

Note:  A great reference source I found on this issue, in the context of the U.S. Federal Government workforce, is an SIKM presentation shared by Acquisition Solutions.