The ‘Three I’s’ of SharePoint

Every business can benefit from SharePoint. The utilitarian system has been adopted as the platform for hundreds of solutions for varying types of businesses, but is often misunderstood or misused. This is caused by a number of factors including sheer versatility of the system being overwhelming, which can make it hard to pin down relevant areas SharePoint can help with.

Even developers and SharePoint enthusiasts can confuse business owners by being too wrapped up in the technicalities and not taking time to de-mystify the system to non-tech orientated customers and clients. SharePoint is supposed to be about simplifying business life, not making it more complex.

In order to keep things simple, you first need to isolate the areas within the business that SharePoint may be implemented. HR, Quality control, office and document management, customer services, project management and more can all benefit from a well-executed system.

However, you need to also consider how to article the challenges faced within these business areas in order to formulate a clear and concise brief, with a project scope and specification that will highlight and plan the ways SharePoint can assist or even transform day-to-day operation.

Technology Services Group’s ‘Three I’s of SharePoint’ should be taken into consideration when constructing a brief.

Issues

Each department within a business has issues that need to be solved. An office carries with it a plethora of micro-management and preparation issues. Perhaps your office has an important document that needs prepared for meetings but is frequently misplaced or lost in a chain of emails. Alternatively it could be trying to ascertain which version of a business critical document is the latest one.  It could even be that software is only installed on a few PC’s but more people need its functionality.

Identifying these issues is a key part of SharePoint success.

Imagination

A good SharePoint solution means some creative thinking. Spend time looking at your business or your client’s business. Work out the solutions that are needed by thinking of how a perfect system would work – in an ideal world how would things run?

Look at other systems for inspiration and take what it needed. For example, you could use many of the same processes or workflows used by a customer complaints system in a quality control manufacturing application. The customer complaints system will record incidents and trigger events. The data can then be analysed or reported on automatically through its centralised location. In many respect, the ‘architecture’ of the system would essentially be the same as one needed for quality control.

Improvement

Any business must be continuously improved as it progresses. SharePoint should be used in conjunction with this growth and can support it via the likes of a site maintenance system that can help log tasks and allocate resources that continually changes as resources increase or change. The system could also be linked to training records to help notify and update staff with the latest techniques or health and safety guidelines.

These systems can be built without custom coding, using the standard features of SharePoint to deliver optimal solutions to corporate problems.

Ideally, you shouldn’t avoid custom code if it’s not needed as it’s time-consuming and inefficient – and can store up problems for the future. Lots of problems can be solved by SharePoint integration where the three I’s are considered. Design and deployed correctly it’s a great way to build efficient systems that can be flexibly used alongside ERP and CRM solutions but is sadly often misunderstood and misused. Take the right steps and create a useful, invaluable system.

by Tony Hughes via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community