I've been a consultant of one stripe or another for most of the past 30 years. My focus has been on technology strategy, which I consider to be equal parts Enterprise Architecture, Project Management, and Business Process Improvement. A good technology strategy merges all three into a single set of objectives in support of the organizations overall business goals.
Being a strategy wonk, I'm obviously drawn to ground-breaking technologies that will have a disruptive impact on the business world. Disruptive technologies are technologies that rapidly change the rules and present amazing new opportunities to solve old problems. Those who keep up with those technologies do very well, and those who ignore them generally disappear. SharePoint is the most important disruptive technology in the world today, IMHO.
When I was about 30 (19 years ago) I was hired by one of the world's largest storage manufacturers to solve a big problem I went to the customer's headquarters expecting to solve some sort of mass storage problem. Imagine my surprise when I was told by my sponsor (a C-level executive) that their highly skilled and valuable engineers were experiencing low morale quitting in droves. Would I please see what I could do to help them retain their engineers?
Since I was a hardware and software "systems engineer" at that time, I was pretty mystified to be working with peopleware. The customer insisted so I signed on for what would become a one-year engagement. After attending endless meetings, making friends with the various key engineers, and listening a whole lot, I realized what the problem was. These highly motivated and highly skilled engineers were spending the vast majority of their time trying to find usable information! They were spending so much time acting like informational archeologists that they never seemed to get around to being engineers.
Each of the company's subsidiaries had their own legacy systems, and these legacy systems couldn't share even basic information with other subsidiaries. The biggest example that comes to mind is that no two subsidiaries used the same work-order numbering system. Some were sequential and some were not. Some were simple indexes and some had embedded logic in the work orders. Some used alpha and some used alphanumeric work orders.
The highly trained engineers spent most of their time trying to reconcile and cross reference incompatible work order numbers (and other mundane pieces of information) in order to simply track the history of work products. It was just awful for them.
In order to help them share information more effectively, I created what i then called a "Common Data Architecture" which was a database of standard terms, formats, and variances. We didn't know enough back then to call it a taxonomy, but that is exactly what it was.
We recognized that the Common Data Architecture would need constant updating, management and trimming. So, we formed a "CDA Governance Team" populated by people from very different walks of life across the organization. It all worked amazingly well.
Not only was it effective, it was democratic and collaborative. No one had to adhere to the Common Data Architecture (CDA) unless they wanted to share information with others or receive shared information. Over time it became easier for folks to adhere to the standard rather than be ostracized by their peers.
We didn't know it at the time, but we "accidentally" used many modern collaboration concepts like: data stewardship, collaborative governance, federated governance, taxonomy planning, and data standardization long before these were commonly understood strategies.
This experience changed my professional life forever. Never again would I forget to include people in my strategic technology planning. This was the first time in my professional life that I saw the strategic "big picture" that integrates people, information, business processes, and technology.
When I first heard about SharePoint, I knew it was going to be world-changing--totally disruptive. SharePoint is the first compelling solution to the "Common Data Architecture" problem I first encountered 19 years ago.
If you are interested in SharePoint (WSS/MOSS) and taxonomy then don't miss the SharePartXXL Taxonomy Extension for Microsoft SharePoint that adds taxonomy-based categorizing on item level to SharePoint.
See the demo:
http://www.sharepartxxl.com/products/taxonomy/default.aspx
Posted by: Frank | August 18, 2008 at 04:26 AM