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| ARTICLES | February - March 2011 |
Effectively communicating the power of SharePoint to a business audience
Need to get a betting understanding of what SharePoint is and what it can do for your organisation? Put yourself in the place of a consultant trying to communicate what the SharePoint platform offers in a way that makes sense.
MOST SharePoint consultants interact with a vast range of clients and I often find that organisations simply have no idea what SharePoint is, what it can do and, most of all, how they can apply it to solve their business issues. Over the years I have found that we are extremely poor at communicating what the platform offers in a way that makes sense to an organisation.
For instance, in nearly every presentation that I have been in I have seen the following diagramme presented to end users or non-technical staff.
The good old pie! However, from the point of view of an organisation this pie is meaningless. Communities, composites, insights are not common vocabulary used within any organisation and in many cases will confuse both technical and non-technical business staff.
We need to find a better paradigm to communicate with business users and decision makers in a way that is much more in tune with their organisation. Why is this important, you ask? Why not simply just show the IT department the pie? The fact is that SharePoint is a business tool. More often than not it’s the business that will drive the implementation of SharePoint rather than the IT department.
With most of us coming from a technical background we sometimes miss the mark in engaging with this core audience that SharePoint will ultimately benefit. Honestly, I keep trying to make sure that I am adjusting my message and content depending on the audience that I am speaking to. But let’s be honest, it’s not easy!
So here are some of the things that I keep in the back of my mind when I am talking to organisations about the platform.
Find a tangible business issue
A greater understanding can be gained by an organisation of the power of SharePoint 2010 by demonstrating the various types of business solutions that can be built using platform features rather than just talking about the features themselves.
Sometimes you need to delve deep into the real issues that an organisation is facing in order to be able to show the value of these solutions. So let’s assume that you are giving a presentation to a client about the platform:
The wrong way
The Organisation: I have a problem with collaboration; I need my staff to collaborate more!
You: Great! SharePoint is built for collaboration! Have you seen a team site before? It has a document library and a task list, plus a calendar!
Although this seems like a good conversation to have it’s really not. Firstly ask yourself what does collaboration mean in the context of this client? Are they having trouble getting documents approved by people in a timely manner? Are they having trouble locating experts? Is content getting lost after been emailed around to clients?
Using such broad stroke terms such as collaboration, information management, knowledge management and others may be applicable in situations where you are talking to high level executives. However I think that you still need to drill down to a business issue that relates to these concepts in order to capture the attention of your audience. Business users have business problems, not SharePoint problems! Let’s try again:
The better way
The Organisation: I have a problem with collaboration; I need my staff to collaborate more!
You: I see! What are the issues that you are actually facing though? Can you name some specific examples?
The Organisation: Actually we have a huge problem in getting timely sign-off from managers; we are losing valuable time in getting products to market because of this issue.
You: Right, maybe we can streamline that sign-off process using some business process automation? This is when we can automate the approval of content, we can send reminder emails to make sure that this is done on time and ultimately provide some visibility into the whole process.
You see much better! Not only did we show how SharePoint can function in the context of their organisation but we also demonstrated a broad range of platform capabilities that we can combine into a tangible business solution. But above all we used business terms to solve a specific business issue.
Use business nomenclature
Basically, use terms that make sense to end users and organisations.
‘Team Site’ and ‘Document Library’ don’t mean a thing to most users. Let me repeat that. ‘Team Site’ and ‘Document Library’ don’t mean a thing to most users. But if you use names that an organisation is familiar with then you can quickly transform a Team Site into a tangible business tool. For example, why not Project Delivery Site, Board Meeting Site, Patent Application Workspace, Legal Review Dashboard, or Meeting Playbooks.
Any of these names makes much more sense in a business context. This makes SharePoint instantly more accessible to the organisation and shows that this product can be customised to solve their business issue, not a general business issue others might be having.
Demonstrate SharePoint use within an organisational context
Let me give you two ways of presenting the new managed metadata, document library and social features of SharePoint
The wrong way
You: So here we have a Team Site with a document library with site columns that act as metadata. This is all stored in a document library where we can apply metadata and ratings. Not only that, we now have social tools that allow people to tag and comment content so that other people can see what it is. We can also use these pivots on the left here to filter by metadata as well. Isn’t all this great?
The Organisation: What is this guy talking about? This has no relevance to what I do, plus social tools just sound like a bad idea.
Our organisation would be at least confused, and at most angry. This is just a jumble of strange words that have no relevance to what they do and what they would like to improve. But let’s phrase this a little differently and apply a specific organisational context:
The better way
You: When we talked last time you mentioned that you had an issue with getting a junior employee up to speed on a certain topic area. Here is a Knowledge Management area within SharePoint where an employee can learn everything about a particular topic area.
All content is categorised in SharePoint so that we can easily find it across the enterprise. For example, we are looking for content and experts about international accounting law. We can see all of the content related to this, plus any experts but, perhaps most powerful of all, how much value other users have placed on content. In this way a junior employee knows quickly what content is the most valuable, saving time. Finally, we can navigate through this content using a combination of categories that are centrally defined and controlled. For instance, maybe we want to see only items relating to Barbados, we can do that using a SharePoint feature called ‘metadata navigation’.
The Organisation: This is exactly what our business needs. I would love to have our junior employees get up to speed more quickly.
Straight away we anchor our conversation in their business issue, in this case junior staff members finding information. Then we present a specific solution to a business issue that not only demonstrates lots of cool SharePoint features but can instantly be recognised as a cost saving to the organisation. A little context can go a long way.
Promote business solutions not product features
Finally the real power of SharePoint comes when you show a client a solution to their business issue, not regale them with the many product features that the platform provides.
Really this is a combination of the three points above: finding a tangible business issue, using business nomenclature and then demonstrating the product in an organisational context. Of course this assumes that you know a little about the business that the client is engaged in. Personally, even if I am doing a SharePoint demonstration to a client that I have not met, I research their industry, how their organisation is structured, any other organisations of the same size and scale to at least give me something to anchor the conversation around.
In this way even if I am talking about search I can tailor the approach to their understanding. In this case I am trying to explain the power of federated search to client along with the ability to index other data via BCS.
The wrong way
You: SharePoint 2010 comes with amazing search capabilities which allow you to crawl and index multiple repositories such as third-party locations through the use of federated location description files. We can even crawl your database using the new BCS functionality so that all this is available in the search index.
Organisation: Crawling and indexing makes me think of spiders…
The better way
You: I’m sure that finding content within your organisation is problematic. One way that SharePoint can help is by offering an integrated search experience that can search content within SharePoint but can also search content in different systems such as your ERP system or your accounts package. Building on this capability we can also search content not residing within your organisation, such as a commonly used web site, to present a total search picture to your users.
The Organisation: I wonder how much time we waste trying to find content? Maybe this guy is onto something?
The author Michal Pisarek is a solution specialist for Habañero Consulting Group, a Microsoft Gold Partner in beautiful Vancouver Canada. He has been working with SharePoint for a number of years and has a passion for finding the right balance between technology, innovation and governance to find maximum value for any organisation using the SharePoint platform.
