Chris Geier SharePoint and Office 365 Blog

1.      Start Small, Start Slow.

Do not pick the “biggest baddest mama jamma” process you have.  Start slowly by picking a small project you that will still add business value but you are confident you can tackle in a relatively short time span. Many companies try to jump right in and solve broad reaching big problems and solve them big bang style with one process.  Picking a smaller more easily tackled process will allow you get that experience under your belt and help you begin to build momentum with that success. Starting small will also help you gain the important supporters and proof of ROI you will need to continue on with further projects.

2.      Don’t go for perfection (at least right away)

Do not forget the focus of BPM is delivering value to the business.  Do not get too bogged down in delivering the 100% perfect process right away.  Get the process good enough and let the tools and methodologies take over and improve the process over time. Many times these processes evolve significantly anyway. It is best to get that process automated and being continually improved while in use rather than trying to get it perfect before implementation.  Keep in mind an important aspect that may make it possible for you achieve all this is COMPROMISE.  Be prepared to make compromises as to what should be given priority and what can wait.  When talking compromise always be sure to link back to the business and business value during these conversations, do not make these decisions in isolation.

3.      Build in good intelligence at every step.

The only way to get good value from a BPM platform is through the ability to have deep insight and intelligence about exactly what is going on in a process. Insights should encompass everything from who is involved, when they are involved, what they are doing and what data they have access to in making their decisions.  All these pieces should be able to be seen and reported on.  This functionality is crucial to process improvement and empowering your users and managers of the process with this type of functionally should ALWAYS be a significant component of the end solution.

When designing and building this piece ask yourself these questions

·        How will they end up knowing enough about their process? 

·        How will they pinpoint where problems with the process are? 

·        How will they make improvements based on data you expose?

·        What metrics are most important to the business?

4.      Build a good team.

When establishing your first BPM team makes sure the right people are involved.  Many times failures in BPM projects stem from the simple problem of having the wrong people involved.  Make sure the people who are actually responsible for using the process everyday are involved from the very beginning.  I have seen many cases where upon delivery of a new process the line level users of the process are presented with a process that does not reflect how they do their jobs. The resulting actions are for the users to circumvent the new process and do things their own way thus ruining any benefit.

5.      Build a good Center of Excellence (COE) from the beginning.

In order to gain the most benefit from each experience you have in implementing new process and transforming your organizations culture to that of a BPM process centric organization.  You need to have a good solid experienced COE.  Ensuring this team is established and in place from the first process on will benefit them the most. For more thoughts on COE see my recent blog post here

6.      Fully Understand Every process you take on

Many mistakes in process design can be avoided through ensuring there is enough understanding and clarity behind each and every process.  If those involved fully understand each process and have a good understanding for how people interact with it, the chance of mistakes are greatly reduced.  A great way to ensure this is to have representatives from the team shadow workers who perform the as is process on a day to day basis.  Once these shadow sessions take place those who shadow the users should have an even deeper understanding and clarity of thought about the process and how it works.  Ensuring this eliminates a great deal of opportunities for mistakes or the chance of a process not delivering specifically what it needs to.

7.      COLLABORATE, COLLABORATE, COLLABORATE

No one has all the information; everyone has different perspectives that could prove very valuable to the project. You need to ensure that all members of the project team can EASILY collaborate and share information.  (Can you say SharePoint?)

8.       Evangelize success

BPM implementations are often seen with great apprehension; people don’t understand them and often fear the affects these projects will have on their jobs.  It is of vital importance that for each success you have you evangelize and market these successes to the rest of the organization.  Finding a good “megaphone” or evangelist from each project that can help you get the word out is another key objective each project should have.  Each project should be able to find one person that was affected that LOVES the outcome and would be willing to talk about their benefits openly.  This will in the long run build more positive buzz for your projects as well as reduce resistance.

9.      Admit when you mess up and learn from it.

As stated before people treat these BPM projects with great apprehension.  Seeing big mistakes being made, not admitted to and or covered up will just increase people’s resistance to future projects.  However when mistakes were made and the team openly admits them and at the same time tells how they have learned from them and what they will do differently in the future can actually help reduce apprehension.  This authenticity and transparency can be a crucial piece to BPM process adoption.

10.   Management Buy in is key.

There are going to be very few grass roots successful BPM projects.  You need to ensure that from the top down you has the proper support from management for making the changes necessary to have a successful BPM implementation and start making that move to a process centric organization.  Management support will also aide in obtaining the right resources for the project team. 

A couple days ago I saw a tweet that said overbuying is more detrimental to IT than under buying.  While I can see this argument and in some cases potentially agree.  This as a blanket statement however can be very dangerous.  Could over buying mean buying SharePoint enterprise vs. foundation?  Does this mean over engineering and buying too many servers or oversized servers?  Or does this mean that you are buying software systems that are meant to help but simple non-technical steps can really solve.  I can see this last point because when you are in IT you have a technology hammer and everything looks like a technology nail because that’s what you know.

HOWEVER!

In my experiences I rarely see this overbuying phenomenon.  Rather I have routinely seen “cheaping out” or under buying. Routinely companies think about cost first and meeting the real needs second.  How many times has IT been told they can’t buy what they really need but rather need to buy enough to just get by?  Even though when you factor in TCO and the missed opportunities to capitalize on the benefits the solution could have brought, they still don’t get what they truly need.  I would wager this happens more frequently than IT being given a blank check.

To take this a a step further when talking about under buying…  There is real danger in not buying a solution without a high enough ceiling.  By this I mean you are purposely buying a solution due to cost factors even though it only meets your needs RIGHT NOW (if it even meets all of them).  Another symptom of this is the purchase decision is based nearly entirely on cost, lack of real requirements gathering and planning or a simple lack of foresight. In my years I have seen this more times than I can count.  The real impact is not immediate because you have bought a solution that meets most of your primary currently visible needs.  However all organizations mature in their use of any solution, all organizations change and grow.  Often faster than expected.  Frequently I have seen organizations not only figure this out too late then go back and rebuy another solution.  Many times in these situations this other solution is one they had on their list of solutions to buy in the first place. Now they have double or tripled their cost both in hard costs (repurchase of software) and soft costs (redevelopment of projects) not to mention the lost opportunity costs. Take 3 levels of solution and solution costs.

·        Simple solution 10K

·        Middle solution 15K

·        Advanced Solution 20K

Now take a look at how much an over buy would cost

Now consider the situation where you under bought had issues and had to “Upgrade” 18 months later.  You would end up buying both solutions in the long run thus costs the original $20,000 in expense + $32,500.  This results in costing the company $20,000 more because you would not have to have bought the low end solution in the first place.

This obviously does not take into account any down time, loss of taking advantage of software features, having to train and ramp up twice in addition to possibly having to reconfigure or rebuild anything you built with the lower end product.  People have said that it’s not the hard costs it’s the soft costs, training maintenance etc. that really cost you so the real cost of under buying in these cases may even be greater.

I am not advocating everyone going out and buying the biggest and best solution every time.  Rather I am saying we should not be fooled with blanket statements that say overbuying is the biggest risk to IT.  I believe that this could be restated that not right sizing or “right buying” is one of the biggest mistakes an IT organization or a business can make.  Every organization needs to sit down and COMPLETELY understand their needs both today and expectations for tomorrow.    They need to adequately account for change and growth.  They need to ensure that the solutions, products, tools, resources they acquire today can be flexible, change and grow with them.  The biggest risk is not doing the proper due diligence and over buying or under buying.  Either way there is danger.

What do you think?

Workflow and Business Process Management have become very popular terms in the past few years. They are being used with increasing frequency and often used both interchangeably as well as to describe different things.  Process automation — the common concept behind both of these terms — is a very important one, especially in today’s business world where every company needs to get more done with less to get any competitive advantage they can. 

               If you asked 10 people to define workflow and BPM you would probably not get the exact same answer twice. Why is there so much confusion about all this?            

What is Workflow?

Workflow has been used to refer to and describe many different things.  I have heard many times people refer to the way they do things as “their workflow”    Workflow at its core is really just a prescribed series of steps, tasks and or actions.  This is typically starting with step a, then moving on to Step B, and then then depending on selections either go to Step C or Step C.

A typical workflow will not contain a lot of complexity, i.e. there are not many branches or loops, and each workflow has a defined start and a defined end.  Workflows follow a prescribed path, and have a set number of inputs, and outputs.  The flow is linear and does not deviate; and all exceptions must be built into the workflow and follow the linear path.

Workflow System Characteristics

Typical workflow systems will have a small number of design tools, and focus a feature set on task automation.  The focus of a workflow product will typically be the automation of sequential steps.   
In the SharePoint world this could encompass such things as copying a document, sending an email, or routing a form to a manager for approval.  Improving these types of basic automation is the core focus of workflow.  You may have a workflow that has a certain level of intelligence, e.g. to listen for events and react to it, but workflow in general has very little in the way of a true dynamic nature.

Workflow is everywhere

In today’s software ecosystem workflow can be seen everywhere.  Many software vendors build some level of workflow into their products. However, be aware that these workflows exist solely to support activity in their product.    A typical CRM vendor is not going to build out advanced integration and or design capabilities to work across different systems and they are not going to build out advanced design canvases to help people graphically lay out workflows.  That is where BPM can come in and provide the answer to this gap.  BPM can be your “uber” workflow manager.

What is BPM?

When thinking about BPM, do you think it is a methodology or a technology / product?

There is no one right answer to this question.  When done right, BPM is really a combination of all of them and more.  Ultimately BPM’s goal is to weave together people, process and technology into a collaborative and repeatable system One could say that BPM is the evolution or maturity of workflow, or in other words that workflow is a component of BPM.  An organization could start with basic task automation (i.e. workflow), but as they mature and see the benefit they will want to add further BPM capabilities to their efforts.

What are some common capabilities of a BPM software platform?

·        Support for people and system oriented behaviors

·        Multiple process design surfaces

·        Enablement of Rapid and Easy changes to process either in flight or to be run.

·        Heavy Integration enablement

·        Monitoring and Reporting, both Real Time and historical.

·        Support for Multiple Forms and or interfaces.

Key BPM differentiators from workflow

There are a number of key differentiators between workflow and BPM.  As mentioned, you can think of workflow as a component of BPM where workflow addresses more basic task automation.  Other differences include:

Number and type of process modeling tools

Workflow and Business Process Management have become more pervasive and more necessary in everywhere.  Information Technologists have determined that they need more and more participation from those who know the processes and use the processes today.  Business users need to be able to model out processes using intuitive tools that have terminology they understand.  Because users may not understand the idea of content types, site vs. site collection, or web services.  A typical BPM solution will provide them with more interfaces to do design as well as more persona-based interfaces to participate.  A typical BPM solution provides a visual flow tool to use in modeling such as Microsoft Visio™.

Additional System Integration support

Real world processes need support for processes that not only span groups, but across an entire company and their respective systems on the back end.  BPM systems will typically allow for easier more complete integration with numerous other systems such as a data warehouse, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and many others.    They will allow for more types of system interaction beyond that of just reading data points.

Advanced Reporting

End-to-end process visibility is a critical component of any BPM system.  Process participants and managers need more and easier ways to analyze, surface, and report on all aspects of a business process.  While workflow will be focused on specific details, e.g..  “this process has 5 steps, and it takes an average of 2 days 4 hours to complete” or  “if it branches you can see that 7 times the process followed path a, and 3 times it followed path b”, for  true analysis you need to take that one step further.  You need the data behind that process to be surfaced that allows you to see not only what steps were taken but what data was involved. Why was a decision made on the data?

For a retail process that helps to process product recalls, and/or product defects in a basic workflow environment I may be able to easily see that a typical process takes 72hours, and that store 652 tends to have the fastest processes.  I may even be able to tell that Step 5 is the step that takes the longest.  However these reports don’t associate the real data behind that process allowing me to understand that recalls from manufacturer A take the longest.  You can really slice and dice how the process relates to the underlying business data.  THAT is how you can really understand your process and help to achieve process improvement.

Help to answer the “What if” question.

Changes to processes are a common occurrence but how do you better plan for and understand changes to your process. How can I use real data and real understanding of a process to model and understand the effect of changes.  What things can you change that would really improve and make the overall process more efficient?  Enter in process simulation!  With this you can make quick and easy changes to a process and see what their affects are before you make the changes to the production running process.  You can use proposed and historical data to determine the real affects.

The focus of BPM systems

While in the BPM world you still need to build and orchestrate processes, the real focus is about process management. Taking those processes and continually gaining additional insight into them so that you can always be making improvements.    BPM will take process orchestration to the next level, and allow for complex process interactions, analysis and optimization.    The goal of this optimization is one of the key tenants of BPM and differentiates BPM from workflow.  Basically, this is the “B” in BPM…. Manage processes in such a way that they improve efficiency in the short run, but allow the Business to continually reassess its performance to continually improve.  This improvement does not always need to be technical or system oriented, but also resource and or product decisions.

How does SharePoint fit into all this?

Many organizations are looking to integrate SharePoint more and more into their organization. SharePoint is becoming the central point of information sharing and collaboration in an organization. Organizations are acknowledging SharePoint’s ability to promote interactivity among people via a very its extensible platform offering  Thus it makes sense to use SharePoint as default point for information sharing and collaboration surface process information.  By extension SharePoint becomes a natural complement to a BPM strategy.  Surfacing your workflow and integrating your BPM processes into SharePoint are a perfect combination like chocolate and peanut butter.

I was one of those crazy folks that pre-ordered the Kindle Fire weeks and weeks before it even came out read a real review of it or even touched it. I finally got it in the mail last week and have been busy playing around with all aspects. Everything from the intended reading to email and movies. My overall impression is pretty good. I am still happy with my purchase. Although I am not quite as “jazzed” as I anticipated I would be.

It arrived in a non-descript box, but did announce to the world that this was indeed a Kindle fire. I wonder how many “disappeared in transit”

And looks great right out of the box with little setup.

The Pros

I love the look and feel. It’s the perfect size and weight. The overall feel is one of good construction, solid etc.

Apps

Adding and uninstalling apps is easy. Very similar to my iPad, iPhone experience.

Books

The book purchasing and reading experience is truly amazing. I am one who was very nervous about this as I love my books. I love the feel of the book in my hand and taking notes, highlighting different passages etc. This has taken some getting used to on the Kindle and I still have a ways to go but the start is much better than I thought I would be. The text is crisp and clear, the paging is near perfect. I still have some learning to do on highlighting and how I can come back to just hightlights but I am encouraged.

Media

Playing music and movies is very easy, the picture is great and the sound is better than expected. Still working on the amazon prime part of movies and TV, so more on that later

The Web

I must say I am literally shocked at how the browser operates. Its tab based as it should be and I have not found any sites yet that I had issues with browsing, even SharePoint worked great.

Disappointments

Keyboard and keyboard use are a little more sensitive than I am used to. I am consistently having to backspace and correct

Apps

Many very cool apps are there but no Google apps, no tweet deck and I have no idea why there would be so many apps that are in the android store and not in the kindle app store. I routinely go look for apps and are presented with messages they are not available or worse yet find it and it says it is not compatible. Even more shocking I have no app to manage my AWS information and account. I would think this would easily be there.

Navigation

Navigation is good but I have routinely had difficulty getting the home button to pop up so I could navigate back.

Volume control

No hardware volume buttons

There many things I have not had much of an opportunity to explore but that have some real potential including the “pulse” app which is very neat.

What does this boil down to? I think it’s a terrific device, by far and away the best kindle the best e-reader out there. Your satisfaction with it boils down to your expectations and why you purchase it. If you are looking for a cheap tablet you will probably be disappointed due to the app situation for now. If you bought it primarily as a book reader and media device I think you will be very happy with your purchase.

I really love the idea of thanksgiving. Taking a step back and actually trying to think about things we are thankful for rather than blowing through our days full of busy schedules and projects that have 28 hours of stuff to do that needs to be crammed into 24hours of day. There are always stories to be read and heard of people who are far less fortunate than us that still have such positive outlooks on life. The human spirit truly can be an amazing thing. Being involved as my family is with the children’s tumor foundation we are constantly hearing of families struggling with health issues and I just wanted to take this opportunity short as it is to take stock of what I am truly thankful for.

1. My wife and children. As many of you have pointed out I am truly blessed to have a wife that puts up with me. There are a lot of us who have jobs that require a lot of work, dedication and travel. I am blessed with not only a fantastic wife and children but one that helps and supports me in my work and understands my schedule and supports it.

2. My families health. Even though my daughter Ella-Claire has been diagnosed with NF1 we are very thankful we have not had any significant symptoms. More could always happen but for now we are very blessed and thankful, that she is a very happy healthy young 4year old.

3. My K2 family, a great product and ecosystem to evangelize, a great work environment, great people, and that I was able to come back to a place that truly feels like home to me.

4. A great community of friends. We may not be family we may not even be lifelong friends. But there are many people in this community that I do consider friends, that I love being around, that offer help when help is needed, that offer encouragement, that offer a hand, that offer a kinship that can only come from shared experience. Even though this shared experience is not something as deep routed as some would have our shared experience and passion for both community and SharePoint in some ways bonds us all together into a club. I want to call out a few folks that have really been extra special to me in some way in 2011.

• Cathy Dew @catpaint1
• Dan User @Usher
• Wes Preston @idubbs
• Raymond Mitchell @Iwkid
• Andrew Clark @SharePointac
• Rob Bogue @RobBogue
• Jeff Shuey @jshuey
• Matt Gowin @MattGowin
• Lori Gowin @LoriGowin
• Ben Curry @curryben
• Paul Schaeflein @paulschaeflein
• Mark Rackley @MRackley
• Holly Anderson @anders998
• Codi Kaji

5. I am thankful for my health. None of us is in 100% perfect health. Especially as we get older we have little quirks. I have my quirks but I know it could all be worse. I have managed to START to get into better shape this year and slowly that is making a different. Right now I am very happy and thankful for my health

6. Being able to share, speak, and travel. I am lucky to have a great job that provides me with the opportunity get out there and share my passion, share my knowledge and interact with a FANTASTIC community.

7. I am thankful for a great home. We have lived in the same house for almost 10 years and even though it is not worth what it once was we are still above water and we are blessed to have it.

8. I believe I have been blessed to do a good job at what I do. I am very thankful for this

9. My in-laws. This may be sacrilege and very anti stereo type to some but my in-laws are awesome. From the very beginning they have treated me like one of the family and taken me in without question. They have been there through good times and bad for me and my family. I am not sure how we could have gotten to where we are without them

10. Our Country. The US has its problems but all places do. I am very thankful that I have been born into and have grown up in a great country with freedoms and opportunities that many other places around the world do not have.

That’s my list, it was a great exercise coming up with it, really made me sit down and think. What’s your list?

I have previously blogged about process efficiency and how to calculate some ROI, although that post was focused on a process that was used as a referee to more formal business processes.    However, getting ROI out of a BPM/workflow platform is not just limited to formal business processes.  This is a great thing because there are millions of knowledge workers out there who spend a great amount of time in repetitive tasks that could benefit from some workflow automation. As an example, let’s take a look at document creation and management, a common knowledge worker task.

According to the IDC in the article “The hidden costs of information work”

The average information worker spends an average of 13.3 hours per week creating documents, which is a direct content-related task. However, there are more collaborative tasks that can benefit from process automation.

Information workers spend

·        4.3 hours managing document approval 

·        4.0 hours managing document routing

·        8.8 hours editing and reviewing documents

What if we could reduce these 17.1 hours by empowering them with some collaborative workflow?

Let’s take a look at some simple numbers.

First, let’s assume a number of users each create 1 document per day, and work 46 weeks per year. So, for 10 users, 2300 documents are created per year.  Using these numbers, you can see that a company with 250 knowledge workers will  create about 57,500 documents per year.  Adding in a fudge factor of 1.25 for good measure, you can see that a company like this would create about 71,875 documents in any given year.

How does this correlate to workflow, SharePoint and saving time?  Let’s assume with SharePoint and some workflow we can save time on each document through better collaboration, tracking, review of materials etc.

The table above shows that for each minute you save on a per document basis you can save $32,552 per year.  Another survey “Disciplined Autonomy”

shows that 45% of respondents spend at least four hours per week simply following up on documents they distributed to see if they have been received, approved and or acted upon.  The survey also found that 61% of the respondents felt that the existing way of doing things frequently interfered with the ability to complete their tasks. So, there is strong evidence that having a good workflow tool can be a valuable tool to your knowledge worker force, if the tool can easily show and track documents in process or review. 

With a good workflow process you can quite easily reduce the amount of time spent on frustrating, mundane tasks such as chasing down who is working on reviewing which document, sending out emails, calling around encouraging people to get their review done, sending your comments and waiting for basic information you need to get your jobs done.  With good workflows you can account for people not performing reviews through the use of escalations. You can account for people being out of the office through an out of office service that can redirect work to delegates.  Each workflow can be reported on, audited, tracked and be counted on to be repeatable so that the same processes are followed each time, without fail.

Take these benefits even further by picking a workflow tool that empowers knowledge workers to quickly create both ad-hoc and more formal document-based workflows on their own by providing them with easy-to-use design tools they can use to build processes that can be used and reused across the entire organization. Empowering a knowledge worker with the tools to help themselves will prevent your IT staff from being bogged down with creating these workflows, allowing your organization to save even more while obtaining these results quickly and more easily. 

What do you think?

What are your goals for workflow, and or BPM?

·        Singular focused 1 process and done?

·        Divisional?

·        Group?

·        Enterprise?

If you said enterprise you must setup a Center of excellence (COE)

A BPM COE is a group that absorbs and promotes BPM best practices, knowledge and methodology in the area of BPM.  The BPM COE will introduce additional skills, knowledge and competency into an organizations BPM projects and efforts.

A COE can provide for the skill sets necessary to have a more successful BPM process development and maintained effort, and can also provide for better ROI based on increasing skill sets driven by a COE to quickly ramp up supporting processes and applications.  The COE will seek to promote better project management, process design, requirements gathering and improvement methodologies.  Hopefully resulting in better efficiency and cost savings on all BPM projects

When building out your first process you and the team members go through a great deal of growing and learning.  In many organizations there is no ability or plan to leverage this experience, knowledge and learning.  This prevents these learning’s from improving the organizations ability to build out the next process better than the last, ideally each process project will be better, easier, faster, more efficient.

I recommend that before you even begin building out your first process establish the COE team. This way they are in place from the beginning.  This way they are able to take advantage from every step in the process journey.

The COE team will look different in every organization, will change over time and most likely be virtual in nature.  But to begin with you can start with:

1.      COE Program Manager –(not necessarily dedicated in the beginning but long term when organizations get serious this should be)

2.      IT team member representation (how do you best pick these participants.  Are the same ones involved in each project or is it based on availability.  There needs to be process specialists) Often times they need training and are specialists in the technology such as K2.

3.      Project Manager(s) (dedicated process specialists long term)

4.      Business Representatives and or liaison

a.      Process owners

b.      Evangelist (someone that is able to proactively market the BPM platform capabilities to help business units understand what it can mean to them)

What should your COE do after Task 1 Establish a solid COE team?

1.      Set Application Development Standards

2.      Set Reference architectures

3.      Set standard Platform Infrastructure

4.      Set guidelines for Project identification

5.      Establish solid  Role Identifications

6.      Work towards Technical enablement by role

7.      Establish a standard POC on the platform

8.      Work on production projects on the platform

9.      Work to provide and receive constant Feedback

10.   Hold regular meetings

11.   End each project with wrap up closeout meetings.  Ensure you document and discuss key tasks key learning, what went well what didn’t.  Ensure that these can be used in all subsequent projects that produce and or modify processes. (SharePoint is a great place to do this)

12.   Encourage extensive collaboration.  They should be in regular touch.

With a COE established experience and knowledge gained is compounded each project and each time a process is improved, modified etc. Typically in the beginning the knowledge growth of a COE is exponential so you will have to be ready for the onslaught.  Think of the applications or products you have implemented in the past.  After it’s over you almost always say I would have done it differently if I had to do it over. The reasons behind this are the reason why a COE is so important. Each process you plan design and build can be thought of as that next time.  With a good COE you can document that previous time and constantly refine how you do business process.

Starting talking to your colleagues about this idea and see if starting a BPM COE isn’t something you can start now!

One common quote I see when researching different BPM approaches or ideas is one by Bill Gates:

“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Now I do at some level buy into this statement, but only at a very low level. I believe this applies to basic low level task automation and or workflow and not any real type of BPM effort with a BPM platform. Why is that you ask?

Well, I believe that people need to begin automating what they know. You are better off automating a process the way it is today because you really know that process, how it works, who is involved, when and why. You also likely have no conclusive evidence that the process does not work, or why and where it fails.

That is the basic premise of implementing a good BPM platform. You not only can have process automation but you can also have detailed insight and reporting on everything that occurs within that process. Once you automate it or “pave the cow path”, you then have detailed reports that can provide you with evidence as to where the process falls short of expectations and where it succeeds.

Once you have the old process automated, you can then start to take advantage of the found information and tweak the process to improve it. Not just tweak, but tweak with the utmost accuracy because you have the proper details, statistics and reports that justify the changes you make. You also now have a baseline to compare against, so that when you do finish your tweaks you can emphatically point to specific measures of improvement. You could not easily do this if you completely changed the process before you automated it.

I can see cases where you may want to “fix” the process before you automate it; however I reject the assumption that some people point to and say you should always fix the process before you automate it.

· What did you do?

· What do you think?

· When do you want to pave the cow path and when do you want to fix the process before you automate it?

There is competition in all different industries. There is also cooperation, with companies participating in alliances, partnerships, or go-to-market strategies, and the like. Unfortunately you very rarely see co-opetition. What the heck is co-opetition you say? That’s not a real word is it? Well no, you won’t find it in the dictionary (I don’t think) but it’s a word I want to define and convince more people to join in.

You take these two words that do have opposite meanings: cooperation and competition. But I contend that these two words can join together for the common good, hence co-opetition.

To best illustrate what this can mean, let’s first take a non-technology example. There are industry associations that have a common goal besides that of raw sales. This common goal is often education, in terms of getting a message out to the public via many different means. As an example, consider the “Got milk” campaign, or the “Beef it’s for dinner” campaign. Neither of these is run by Deans, or Safeway or any other specific business. It is run by the industry association itself. The goal is to educate the consumers about the benefits of drinking more milk.

Each individual company that donates and or participates in some way knows that they are not being called out specifically, so this is not advertising; they cannot tie these dollars to a specific sale or return. However, they know that by consumers understanding that drinking more milk can make you healthier; in turn that consumer may buy more milk. Thus they have the potential of being the vendor that supplies the consumer need of more milk. They may or may not, but the potential is there. If that company believes that they have the best and freshest milk their job is done, and they leave up that last mile to the consumer.

In this respect you can see that this organization has two jobs/responsibilities:

1. Help to get the word out about the benefits of milk.

2. Make the best product possible so that when a consumer makes the purchase decision , that company has the best opportunity to be chosen.

There are many more examples of this idea of companies getting together for a common good, to further the message of their particular industry. Educating consumers, lobbying for new laws, petitioning for change, and the list goes on. So why does this not happen more in technology? Why is there not more co-opetition among companies? I routinely hear stories about different user group sponsorship being problematic because of competitors being present. One company does not want to sponsor because the meeting is being held in a competitors office, or they won’t co-sponsor with a competitor, etc.

I can think of many different technology areas that have significant potential for a really good co-opetition story. Think of simple industry topics like:

· Security

o Best practices for anti-virus, how to best respond to virus outbreaks, end user education,

o Firewall management best practice for architectures, the need for new techniques and education on the latest threats.

· Systems Management

o Sharing best practices for inventorying software, hardware,

o Deploying software,

o Desktop Management.

· Workflow, Process Automation, BPM

o Extol the benefits of these technologies and process mindsets,

o Share how to get organizations to adopt change.

This workflow area happens to be one that I am very passionate. There is a HUGE amount of room here for true co-opetition. The corporate consumers desperately need to be educated on the benefits of process, process management and workflow. They need to be educated on the different maturity levels and what they mean, how they can evolve, and where they can get started. But workflow is just one example of almost every different category of technology where co-opetition is needed.

So I have to wonder why technology is so different than other industries where co-opetition can flourish. I would love to see a few more technology areas put aside their need to crush or bad mouth the competition, create large numbers of battle cards and SWOT matrixes and worry, just for a little bit, about the people they need to reach. Stop being biased about their own product strategy and just help educate the customers about options, ideas, best practices, what works, what doesn’t, and in general WHY they need a product like theirs and less focus on the product. So I have to ask you:

1. Am I living in a dream world?

2. Have I lost it?

3. Can this be done?

4. Can we live in a world where the phrase “an educated consumer is our best customer” really is true?

5. Can we stop the spin? And focus on making sure customers understand what technology can really do for them?

There are a great many reasons why some SharePoint implementations succeed and potentially even more reasons why they fail. From my talks with customers and partners I believe that one of the biggest reasons for success is having a properly empowered and trained user base. Users need to be empowered with knowhow of the new environment and can be self-sufficient in using its different features to do their jobs and do their jobs better and quicker. Having this in place will cause them to use the platform more, be more successful at it and be more likely to encourage others to do the same. This momentum building of getting more and more users using and building out more in SharePoint is often the panacea of a SharePoint implementation. This is often the goal but projects routinely leave off the project plan the steps for training the users. If they do leave some kind of user training in this is often relegated to basic information about logging in and clicking a few common links. While this does help it falls significantly short. Many of the problems with truly understanding the need for training is the implementers lack the understanding of how to really gain adoption through engagement. There really is a lot behind these terms and a great deal of background psychology. I gained an increased level of understanding in all of this, over the weekend when I watched Rob Bogue’s The Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement available from the website here

http://www.sharepointshepherd.com/psychologyofengagement.aspx

Rob clearly did his homework. Each section was well researched and presented. I gained a good deal of insight and additional understanding in the Psychology behind each of the terms. I came away with several ideas of ways to increase engagement and adoption in our own SharePoint implementation and I am looking forward to adding to the content I present at different conferences and events. All in all I am very glad I invested the time to watch and learn from this DVD. I recommend that you give it a try as well