Mark Schneider's SharePoint Taxonomy and Governance Blog

Why should you deploy SharePoint during an economic downturn, and why should you attend a Governance and Taxonomy Workshop to do so?

        You've just been told that you need to cut 20% of your budget immediately.  As you walk from that meeting to your office you are keenly aware that the smiling people you see in the hallway will not all be here next Friday.  Your organization is way beyond deadwood layoffs and is cutting right straight to the bone.  This time you are going to lose critical players the organization depends on day in and day out.

Just as the shock of the meeting wears off and the sick feeling takes hold of the pit of your stomach, one of your knowledge workers comes into your office.  With a big smile the knowledge worker pitches the need to step up the SharePoint project, and goes on and on about the need for something called Governance and Taxonomy planning.  If only they knew how tough things really are...

Why is SharePoint a good idea during an economic downturn, and why is Business Governance And Taxonomy Planning a good, solid move during times like these?  Forget all the technical talk, the buzz words and the raw enthusiasm of technical people with a potential new toy.  You know and I know that, especially during a downturn, there are no technical issues or decisions.  There are only business decisions.  Some decisions will lead your organization to survival and some will lead to disaster.  A really astute decision will lead to your company excelling even in tough times, but what are the key strategic factors in making these decisions?

SharePoint isn't just a new toy, it is a tool that can help your company be more agile while being more strategically focused at the same time.  Think of it as a replacement for Microsoft Windows.  Windows has been a great platform and as such most of the technology decisions have centered around it over the past ten years.  The problem is that Windows is older now than DOS was when it was retired.  Windows is a good tool but its is at an end.  When DOS was at the end of its useful life, Microsoft introduced Windows 3.X which installed on top of it.  Windows started out being a program interface tool that extended the life of DOS.  Over time DOS was absorbed into Windows.  The same thing is happening now.  SharePoint is a virtualized program interface that installs on top of Windows and is used within Windows.  Over time Windows and SharePoint will be merged together.  The days of doing your work on physically located desktops is pretty much coming to an end.

SharePoint can be thought of as a series of shared desktops (sites) that house highly intelligent folders (libraries).  These enable people from various locations to work together on a common desktop and manage themselves.  The libraries then provide for document management, tracking, approvals, security and many other highly effective and powerful capabilities WITHOUT IT ASSISTANCE.  IT manages the overall environment but it is the end user that manages and controls the individual libraries, sites, publishing sites and workspaces.

SharePoint also adds the incredibly useful ability to track information no matter how or where it is used by recording metadata and metrics.  This means that you can have dashboards, audits, and reports provided for you that help you make better, faster and more informed decisions.

The biggest value-add for attending one of my workshops is that SharePoint requires a collaborative business planning and business governance approach if it is to be successful.  In order to take full advantage of SharePoint you need to provide maximum tactical freedom to you knowledge workers.  At the same time, you need to articulate the policies and processes that you will use to manage and lead such a rapidly evolving and adapting information organization. 

The answer is to provide a simple structure or taxonomy of business policies that can be implemented in SharePoint.  These then allow the knowledge workers freedom to act tactically using SharePoint, and the policies help provide boundaries, accountability and focus for their ad hoc actions.  Sound slippery?  It is a new management concept to support an entirely new class of technologies, of which SharePoint is the first contender.

So here is a list of concrete reasons to continue with your SharePoint deployment, but to first attend one of my Governance and Taxonomy workshops.  By the way, in order to make this easier on your budgets I've now rolled out a "Public Workshop" that provides open enrollment.  You can send one person to the public workshop and they will come away with the tools they need to begin your Governance and Taxonomy planning process.  The first is in Sacramento, but I am planning to roll out similar workshops in the major regions around the U.S.

Here are concrete business reasons to roll out SharePoint, under the guidance of a Governance and Taxonomy Workshop, especially during a downturn.

1. SharePoint can capture intellectual property that would otherwise be lost. 

2. Survival in uncertain times will depend upon an organizations ability to rapidly adapt to new circumstances in the market.  SharePoint, IF DONE RIGHT, provides agility while also keeping a strategic focus on the organizations goals.  (this is, by the way, what my workshop does.  It helps you decide where and how you can be agile, and where the strategic directives of the organization must be enforced in SharePoint).
3. Economic downturns generally lead to an increase in litigation between companies.  People aren’t paying on time, corners are cut and companies take higher-risk approaches to compliance, competition and everything else.  SharePoint can help limit legal discovery so that the specific parameters of the court are executed in a document or records center.  Open-ended legal discovery can be economically devastating.
4. With travel budgets cut or eliminated entirely, SharePoint provides an effective collaboration medium for geographically-dispersed teams of information workers.
5. SharePoint improves interoperability between line of business applications so that those applications operate more effectively
6. SharePoint delegates most routine day-to-day site and document administration tasks out to the end user.  This reduces the burden on expensive and highly trained IT workers to provide busy-work support tasks like building new sites, customizing sites, setting workflows and approvals, and branding.
7. SharePoint makes use of the skills your employees already have.  It has borrowed its key architectural patterns from PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Windows and Outlook.  So it has a very fast learning curve.

Please feel free to contact me at mark@vitalskill.com for more information about the workshops

©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

If a Cat Has Kittens in an Oven, Does it Make the Kittens Biscuits?

Folk-saying often have a lot of wisdom for those of us driving the adoption of new technologies.  One of my favorite is "If a cat has kittens in an oven, it doesn't make them biscuts."  The kittens are obviously still kittens no matter where they were born. 

Similarly, if you take someone with 10 to 20 years of experience writing COBOL programs and send them to Java training, they will come back and write COBOL programs in Java.  More to the point with SharePoint, if you build a SharePoint environment and treat it like a network store, then it will become a network store.

Change your thinking, change your business approach, and then you will be successful with a tool like SharePoint.

 

 ©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

Good News / Bad News

Good News:  Corporate America seems to finally be getting comfortable with email management

Bad News:  Email is pretty much obsolete as a collaboration tool, and with the upswing in instant messaging and cell-based text messaging, it is kind of obsolete in general.

 

 ©Copyright Mark Ragar Schneider, 2009 All Rights Reserved

Please be Aware of Registered Copyright

Please be aware that the text, diagrams, mind maps, translations, flow charts, taxonomies, grids, tables, photographs and drawing are all covered by REGISTERED COPYRIGHT.

You may link to these articles, but please do not reproduce them electronically or mechanically in any format without written permission.  Please take note that I will likely give you written permission if you ask. To use the content of this blog, please contact me at mark@vitalskill.com

Cost Justifying My Governance and Architecture Workshop

My two-day Governance and Taxonomy Workshop costs $4,000 per day.  This includes the first fifteen (15) participants and there is an additional charge of $250 for each additional participant.  The $250 covers participation and materials for both days.  So the workshop typically costs between $8,000 and $12,000 including expenses.  If this seems expensive, please consider the following quotation from the trade journal "NetworkWorld":

A company that employs 1,000 information workers can expect more than $5 million in annual salary costs to go down the drain because of the time wasted looking for information and not finding it, IDCresearch found last year.

Think that’s bad? A surveythis month of 1,000 middle managers found that more than half of the information they find during searches is useless. 

http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/012307-wasted-searches.html

Here is the key principle everyone seems to miss.  The biggest reason the search engines are ineffective is because your organization's leadership has to decide what information matters and how it is to be treated and managed.  In other words, no corporate search and management technology is going to be able to effectively meet your information needs unless your senior leadership team can agree on the policies that govern that information.

My workshop provides several deliverables, including a pilot project charter, a governance plan, and the top-level of a taxonomy of policies that you can use to guide your information management requirements.

I also spend the first four hours or so providing an executive overview of the recent advancement in information management technologies, what they mean to your organization, and the key information you as a business leader need to provide effective direction for your technology teams.  This is all done without technobabble so that you can immediately begin effectively managing your enterprise information and intellectual property.

In other words, I provide the vital information and skills your leadership team needs to effectively guide the use of information technologies (any information technologies) within your organization.  Because senior leaders are intelligent and pressed for time, I've found that this process can be compressed into two very tough days.  That is, by the way, why my company is called VitalSkill LLC.  Life is short and the market is competitive.  We just don't have time to focus on anything except the most vital skills you need to stay competitive.

Keep in mind that this is a workshop and not a class or seminar.  I'm the coach, you are the star athletes and together we're actually going to get this done in two days.  We won't just talk about it, we'll actually do it.  Please remember that I've successfully done the work with some of the biggest and most prestigious organizations in the world.  It works.

For more information, please send me an email at

mark@vitalskill.com

with your contact information

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Is the Governance and Taxonomy Workshop only Useful for SharePoint?

A reader from the largest space agency in the world (and shall remain nameless) recently asked me if it would be useful to invite non-SharePoint personnel to the Governance and Taxonomy Workshop.  Is the workshop still applicable to other document and content management technologies?  Here is my reply...

The approach I take is “technology agnostic,” so it will benefit stakeholders outside the SharePoint community.  One of my recent engagements involved the SharePoint team for their organization, as well as the Oracle and Google technology teams.  The goal is to create a logical taxonomy that governs information management regardless where and how it is housed.

If you are interested in finding out more about the Governance and Taxonomy Workshop, please email me at mark@vitalskill.com  I'd love to help you make SharePoint as successful from a business standpoint as it is from a technical standpoint.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

What Ultimately is Happening to the Banking Industry?

The Policy Taxonomy that governs the banking industry has been around for a very, very long time.  Why is it in crisis now?  I believe that the old banking taxonomy is obsolete and therefore no longer works in everyday practice.  Just as the discovery of extrasolar planets changed the astronomical taxonomy and removed Pluto from the "planet club," so the evolution of electronic information management and interoperability is ultimately rendering the old banking taxonomy obsolete.

As I've discussed in my blog, and more directly in my workshops, when the taxonomy becomes unstable then the organization must necessarily become unstable.  What might we expect if the taxonomy is changing in the banking industry?

1. Nationalization of the banking infrastructure.  Banks will no longer be willing or able to advance money through the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve will become the clearing house for nnationalization of banking assets.  In other words, it will be the way that the government slowly brings the banking industry under control.

2. International Banking "Firewalls."  - I'm obviously not an economist but a computer scientist, so I think in terms of information systems.  All the nations are going to agree to a kind of banking architecture that is based on some kind of virtualization taxonomy, just like the computer industry is doing right now.

3. Consolidation of banking networks and processes.

4. A central clearing house for transactions (either real or virtual) that uses a meta-currency in order to calculate the differences between currencies.  Control of the meta-currency calculations will essentially influence the entire banking world.

5. We will see no obvious changes any time soon.  If the banking industry maintains the same taxonomy, at least for talking purposes, then folks won't notice that huge changes are occurring.  So, we can expect that the average citizen will not notice or recognize what will likely be a huge shift in control.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

The Cost of eDiscovery - Between $5K and $7K per GB !

According to a recent article in Information Week

Even employing precise keyword searches,Verizon (NYSE: VZ) places the price of processing, reviewing, culling, and producing 1 GB of data at between $5,000 and $7,000, according to a study by the University of Denver's Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. (Click here for full article)

This means that a simple search appliance will, in the long run, be a very expensive solution to an organization's search requirements.  Search appliances are good but they can't do your thinking for you! 

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Why develop a taxonomy at all? Why not just use a "plug and play" search appliance?

Why do you need a taxonomy when there are a number of excellent search appliances available?  The problem is that the effective ability to organize, search and manage your company's intellectual property requires that the context and intent of the information be understood.

Authoritative documents are governed by the author's intent at the time and place that the final document was published.  Automated appliances are great at grinding through mounds of data, but they can't determine what you intended when the document was published.  Was it an official document?  Was it intended for open distribution?  How accurate is teh information?  What contextual information is needed in order to accurately understand the document?

A search appliance can help you find your information, but it can't help you manage or protect that information. 

Effective management of information always starts with a taxonomy of information policies that identify and define critical genres of information within your organization.  Once you have those genres or categories established, you can determine the governance, security, and lifecycle models that will manage those documents in their proper context.

Appliances are wonderful for finding things, but they can't tell you what to do with the information once you find it.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved

Limiting Legal Discovery Using a Policy Taxonomy

The litigation process generally makes provision for one litigant to obtain access to the other’s organizational record.  The worst case scenario occurs when your opponent obtains unlimited or open-ended access to your electronic records.  In order to mitigate this it is a good idea to develop a policy-based architecture that clearly separates between the official corporate record and work-in-progress documents.  Generally, a document becomes part of the corporate record when it has been approved by an officer of the organization as speaking in the collective or official “voice” of the organization.  Other corporate records include posted financial information that has become part of the historical financial record.

A Policy Taxonomy provides an excellent means for establishing organizational boundaries that mitigate the extent and scope of electronic discovery.  If financial records are a separate taxonomy category defined by a SharePoint Content Type, then it may be possible to limit discovery to that content type.  Also, it is possible to use the Approval process to govern the transition of documents from one Policy Taxonomy Category to another.  Legal discovery is usually focused on the official record rather than the scratch information that was used to generate the official record.  The locus of authorial intent on the part of the organization centers on the formally published document.

SharePoint can then use a Report Center or Document Center to query and present only those documents that have been approved and published as part of the formal corporate record.  So, ideally legal discovery could be confined to the Report Center or Document Center rather than all the ad-hoc information that are process artifacts of work in progress.

SharePoint is also an excellent tool because electronic discovery generally requires that the information be presented in its native storage format.  Since SharePoint physically stores information in a non-human readable format, it may be possible to confine discovery to that information which is human –readable and its associated metadata records.

This is, by the way, one of the topics in the Taxonomy and Governance Workshop that I present.

© 2008, Mark Ragar Schneider, All Rights Reserved