The topic of SharePoint analytics has been very popular in the SharePoint space for as long as I’ve been familiar with the platform. Historically, the out-of-the-box analytics have not been good. With the move to SharePoint 2013, in fact, it seemed we lost some of the more granular capability. While Microsoft has stepped up their plans for Office 365, and have made major announcements around Delve analytics and cross-workload reporting, there is still a very strong need for SharePoint analytics and reporting, whether online or on-prem.
One of the leading providers within the analytics category is Intlock, developers of CardioLog Analytics. I started working with the Intlock team following the 2015 Worldwide Partner Conference, and connected with Tal Ben-David to organize and conduct a couple joint webinars. The topic of our forthcoming webinar is The Nuts and Bolts of Measuring SharePoint Activity and will be conducted on Tuesday, January 19th at 8am PST (you can register here).
I connected with Tal this past week and asked if he could share some of his background and perspective about the SharePoint analytics space:
[Christian Buckley] Tal, maybe you can begin with a bit of an introduction?
[Tal Ben-David] Sure. I’ve been working in the SharePoint sphere for around a year. Previously, I was a consultant for Accenture. Currently, I’m serving as an Alliance Manager at Intlock, developer of CardioLog Analytics for SharePoint and Office 365. While I’ve only been active in the SharePoint community for a year, my time at Accenture highlighted the growing importance of knowledge management and collaboration solutions for enterprises.
[CB] You really are a noobie. :-) But that's actually a great point to make -- these are not issues just for SharePoint, but for the broader collaboration and knowledge management space. But given your year of experience, what would you say are the top “gaps” in SharePoint analytics, or even the broader KM or collaboration space? Where do most organizations fail when it comes to monitoring and measuring SharePoint?
[TB] I view this as a kind of “two-pronged” gap. First, a gap exists because many organizations fail to recognize how vital it is to incorporate analytics in every aspect of the organization, or lack the resources to do so, including the knowledge management and collaboration space. As cliché as it sounds, we still stick by the old phrase “You can only manage what you measure”.
The second gap is the analytics strategy itself. Once the need for analytics is realized, many organizations fail to employ a dedicated strategy that aligns with their business goals. A dedicated strategy should include having SMART metrics to give the analytics strategy direction, and to turn the data into business potential. This is only possible when the data is harnessed with an advanced analytics solution, as OOTB metrics lack the intelligent insights that advanced solutions offer.
[CB] Not that people even utilize all of the OOTB tools available. Some of that is a technology issue, some of that an education/training issue.
[TB] Exactly. Over and above deploying an advanced analytics solution, companies need to make sure they have knowledgeable personnel who can analyze the data effectively to translate it into an improvement plan. This is often where companies fail to realize the need for external experts or analytics solutions that provide side-by-side consulting services.
[CB] When organizations recognize those gaps/shortcomings, how do they tend to approach the problem? Do they assume everything will be out of the box?
[TB] Most organizations will approach us with specific and detailed requirements, usually after attempting to use OOTB SharePoint analytics or non-SharePoint specific analytics solutions. The customer will also generally have learned the hard way that in order for an analytics strategy to be effective, both business and IT administrators need to be involved in the process. In fact, what we often find that once the organization has recognized these gaps, an advanced analytics solution inevitably sparks senior management’s interest and drives their involvement.
[CB] As organizations begin to move to the cloud with Office 365, how does that change their analytics consumption/needs, or does it?
[TB] Personally, I see no major shift in the needs of analytics with the transition to the cloud. However, with the investment of migrating from On-Prem solutions to the cloud, organizations are realizing the importance of increasing the ROI of their SharePoint environment. Analytics can be particularly useful, both in easing the pre migration process and keeping track of progress post migration. In short, we have seen that the move to the cloud has been a good entrance point for organizations who have been sitting on the analytics fence.
[CB] Collaboration and Engagement have come to the forefront within many SharePoint environments. My view is that this has more to do with the shift from a technology perspective to a business perspective – and the need to show that business value is being achieved. How can an organization monitor and measure Collaboration and Engagement?
[TB] I think this ties back into my previous mentioning of setting up SMART goals, which ensure that organizations can continuously close the loop in their SharePoint environment, meaning employee collaboration can consistently be measured and improved.
[CB] An iterated upon. You'll never get it right the first time. It takes time and learning.
[TB] It’s important to keep in mind that employee collaboration and engagement is often an abstract and soft concept, so an analytics strategy in this space should preferably include a way to personally engage and collect feedback from users, such as surveys. Additionally, to effectively monitor employee collaboration, organizations need to be able to tie back data to a specific user or user groups through advanced segmentation abilities.
[CB] A topic that I am very passionate about is gamification - which is something we'll be jointly talking about in our February webinar. While SharePoint out of the box is fairly light on the tools to help organizations develop gamification strategies to change the behaviors of their end users, it offers an excellent platform from which to build. How do analytics and behavioral targeting help organizations better organize these strategies?
[TB] Analytics are an essential component of the gamification strategy, because they can give you deep insights regarding top users or groups within the SharePoint portal. Organizations can then leverage these insights to inspire “friendly competition”.
A classic example we’ve seen is creating a dashboard with the top 10 users and top influential content that can be shared across the entire organization. We’ve also seen example of site owners vying to create the most collaborative sites. This represents a sort of “higher level” aspect of gamification to improve portal adoption and collaboration.
Thank you Tal for taking time out of your schedule to talk to me about SharePoint analytics, and their value to every business using the platform. If you'd like to reach Tal directly and learn more about CardioLog Analytics, you can find him at tal.ben-david@intlock.com. Or you can register for our January webinar!
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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