In a recent webinar, I was joined by long-time community member Mike Oryszak (@next_connect) from B&R Business Solutions as we discussed the pros and cons of SharePoint as a knowledge management platform, and how idea management could be leveraged to bolster your KM efforts. Mike was a 5-time SharePoint MVP and is one of my earliest connections from the SharePoint community after I left Microsoft back in 2009, having participated with him in many SharePoint Saturday and other events around the US.
You can watch an on-demand recording of our webinar here: From Ideas to Innovation - Formalizing Idea Management in SharePoint
Following our joint webinar, I invited Mike to discuss briefly some of the concepts covered in our session. Specifically, I wanted to hear more about his deployment experiences and talk about some of his customer experiences in using SharePoint as the primary platform for capturing all internal information assets. This is more than just using the platform to store documents -- but a focused knowledge repository to help drive the "ideation" process within the company. This is an important distinction, because we have many systems that store content, but few that enable us to improve enterprise-wide visibility into this collective knowledge. SharePoint has that potential, with some planning and effort. That's what I reached out to Mike to discuss:
[Christian Buckley] Mike, I appreciate you takin the time to rehash some of the topics we just covered in our webinar. Maybe you can give folks a background on your experience and company before we start?
[Mike Oryszak] Sure, no problem. As you know, I am a Senior Solution Architect with B&R Business Solutions. The majority of my career has been working in the Microsoft stack, initially developing with ASP, COM and then later web based .NET applications. Like many of the longtime community members I jumped on the bandwagon early on with digital dashboards and related technologies. I generally claim 2002 as my official start since by then I was working with Portal Server 2001 in a production capacity and developing solutions. The organization I worked for at the time was really into pushing the concepts of platforms and code re-use so the timing was perfect to adopt what SharePoint was to become; a platform for hosting unified business solutions.
[CB] Great, thanks for that. Ok, let's jump into it: In our webinar, we kicked things off by talking about SharePoint as a knowledge management (KM) platform. How has the KM story for SharePoint evolved since the early days (let's say the 2003/2007 versions) of SharePoint?
[MO] In some ways, it seems like everything has changed. You can start by looking at the format of the content, and how people communicate now. In those days everything was absolutely document based, in many cases documents that had been scanned from a printed format. Work in progress documents would of course be in Excel or Word. Since this was a web-based system, one of the first things I really pushed for was taking some of that content that had previously been document based and move it to a format that is more accessible, easier to consume, and easier to locate; displaying it like a web page. Why make somebody browse to a library and open up 10 documents to find what they are looking for when you can display a page of content. Things like employee manuals, standard operating procedures, etc. were prime candidates. Later when features like the blogs and wikis were added, I really looked to leverage those tools. While neither are perfect implementations of those concepts, they were an improvement over prior capabilities and helped to move people away from primarily using documents. Wikis are inherently collaborative, and blogs I’ve always felt offered a much better flexibility than say the announcements list/web part especially since it provides better support for organizing the content with categories and tags.[CB] The early versions of those features were really rough. In fact, I wrote a chapter in my 2010 book about making the out-of-the-box blog features "actually" work.
[MO] The product has come a long way since those early days, but more importantly the way we work has continued to evolve and people’s expectations are higher than ever. It forces us to continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what we can do. One of the bigger issues these days is how to leverage the knowledge you do have in the system and surface it appropriately so that you can take action on it. With that in mind, we see less browsing for content and more dynamically loaded content suggestions based on relevancy or freshness and intuitive content search interfaces that show much smaller sets of data that can be quickly and easily refined.
[CB] I often tell people that the most exciting new features in Office 365 and SharePoint are the search-based features. But Microsoft is really just responding to the demands of the marketplace. Surfacing content is an important aspect of KM. In your view, what are the strengths and weaknesses of SharePoint as a knowledge repository? Where do you see most customers making mistakes in how they deploy and/or use the platform?[MO] I think at its core, one of SharePoint’s greatest strengths has always been, and continues to be, its flexibility. Flexibility in what features an organization chooses to use, and how that can be applied to meet a business challenge like a knowledge repository. I like that it can support informal, unstructured repositories as well as much more formal, structure repositories where there are formal approval and publishing processes to promote or finalize items. It supports content in a number of formats, and it has only gotten easier to find and surface the relevant content.
One of the bigger weaknesses I have experienced in the past few years is lack of good support for mobile devices including both phones and tablets.[CB] Sounds like a great partner opportunity!
[MO] As a consultant, I am more than happy to scope out work to build a beautiful and fully responsive site that can perform well on any device but the time and effort to do that is higher than it should be. Users expect more, and it should be easier. I know Microsoft sees this, but I think they continue to lag 3-5 years behind. In addition many of my customers still using the traditional server version of SharePoint still haven’t implemented the system in a way that the platform is accessible to those devices. It is trapped behind a firewall and requires a VPN connection. This limitation isn’t an issue with SharePoint itself, but the overall corporate security policies that should be easy to address.
[CB] Jumping over to the topic of our webinar, what would you say is the value of incorporating idea management into SharePoint? And how does that play into SharePoint's strengths?
[MO] One of the unique and great things about how SharePoint is used in most organizations, is that it is accessible by all employees. This is certainly true for organizations that use it for an Intranet, but also for department, collaboration, or project sites. As such, it should get the most visits or eyes on the screen. Incorporating idea management into a system that is frequently accessed is pretty critical since it increases your chances of getting users engaged in the idea management activities. Secondly, many of SharePoint’s core features align well with defining content areas (sites, libraries, lists) around a topical idea with flexible security and notification features. We also have built in features that make search for and surfacing content easier than it is in most systems. The long term value of these ideas are based your ability to find it when you need to. With these things in mind, I haven’t seen any solution that is widely adopted and more capable than SharePoint.
[CB] Looking at organizations who have successfully deployed idea management, how much would you say is the technology versus end user education?[MO] You definitely cannot do one without the other, however most of the tough decisions are rooted in culture issues and not technology limitations. Who should be allowed to participate and how, then what do you do with that content. Traditionally management wanted full control over that process and who could participate. The concept of the idea box on a shop floor became sort of a cliché and was not taken seriously. Things have changed dramatically though in the last 10 years and employees want to have a voice and be heard. Modern workers are willing to be engaged in the process of ideation when the organization’s culture supports it and the proper incentives are in place. Even more important, when you have high engagement throughout the workforce, the quality of the ideas is likely to be much higher, and the ability to refine and take action on them easier. I believe the companies that are able to successfully manage this will be significantly more successful than those that avoid, ignore, or fail to implement idea management.
[CB] We can train people on how to use tools, but how important is company culture, do you think?
[MO] Each organization is in a different point on the culture maturity curve, but everyone can take a step. For organizations that are just starting out, we start things small to get that pendulum swinging in the right direction. It could be something like a simple poll with a small set of choices to get people into the habit of providing feedback. Executive sponsorship is critical, and incentives always help. Who wouldn’t be willing to write up a short list of idea contributions for the chance to win extra time off or a night at the movies? Successful organizations tend to budget for incentives and do a good job marketing the process and results along the way. Never underestimate the value of a good communication plan.
When the culture is right you can start to fine tune the technology. One of the keys in my experience, is making the whole process easy for both organizers and contributors. It helps to have a solution that can support the process from start to finish; from the initial idea, promotion of the idea, refinement, and then later implementation of that idea. If there are a lot of manual steps in the process flow, it can disrupt the flow and lead to lost momentum and delay the overall implementation of the idea. Organizations that are successful with idea management remove those impediments. I have also seen gamification successfully employed in a number of scenarios which can be baked into the platform.
[CB] Ok, a related question: what SharePoint features or capabilities would you say are underutilized by customers – maybe out of the box capabilities that could help them improve their KM efforts today? Any best practices you find yourself repeatedly telling customers about?
[MO] One area I spend a lot of time educating customers on is Search. Traditionally I think people have underutilized search, or at least have not optimized it to increase their chance of success. There really is a lot of power and some great features that can be leveraged there that often are not. This includes generic search results which I think everyone is familiar with, specialized search centers optimized for a particular set of content, as well as search driven content aggregation and roll-ups. The past few years I have focused much of my community speaking to getting familiar with things like the content by search web part, custom display templates, and optimizing your search settings. There are some incredibly powerful tools here that often go underutilized in most environments.
[CB] From what you understand (or interpret) from Microsoft’s roadmap, what is changing about how knowledge is captured and disseminated in SharePoint? And what will be the role of partners (ISVs and SIs) in that future?[MO] At the core of my interpretation is the thought that they are trying to simplify things for the end user, and it is hard to argue against that. As they simplify the complexity, I believe in some cases it comes at the cost of some features that are mission critical to some organizations. Specifically thinking about things like the modern lists and libraries, which currently have some uncertainty. I encourage everyone to participate in the discussion through the community and through http://ift.tt/2bewNOA.
My approach as a consultant and SI has changed significantly in the past few years. In the past it was always very effective to build custom server solutions, and capable developers could build and maintain those solutions with ease. With the way things have transitioned though, I am much more selective with clients on determining what should and should not be built into SharePoint. And for scenarios where they want to build a robust application, but really only have the requirement that it be surfaced in SharePoint we will look to build the solution in something like Azure and expose it through something like the app/add-in model. All of the capabilities are still there, upgrades should be easier, and it comes with the added bonus that it could be ported to other platforms or used independently of SharePoint.
[CB] What kinds of services does B&R provide to help customers build out better knowledge management capabilities?
[MO] Any successful knowledge management implementation is going to start with successful planning exercises. We have some really smart people on the team that can help work through planning sessions. We can use that to help identify the goals, the requirements, the types and format for content and then start to align those with out of the box or custom features. In most cases we look to build an overall implementation roadmap that will last multiple phases. That is not necessarily because the technology is difficult or risky, but because we want users to have time to absorb the changes and allow any culture changes to happen. In some cases we stay fully engaged through the future phases, in others we simply come back to monitor and recommend adjustments while the bulk of the work is done internally. We are pretty flexible with our services, and our best customers are the ones where we have a true partnership.
Thank you again for expanding on this topic, Mike. And for those who would like to hear more on this topic, you can watch a recording of our webinar here.
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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