“SharePoint: The Reality Series” by Marc Solomon

I was just vainly searching myself on Google (in the context of playing with https://vizibility.com, so it’s not that bad), and I ran across two articles by Marc Solomon at KMWorld.com  that had quotes from me.  I had talked to Marc back in January, and pretty much had forgotten about it. Marc is very active in the Boston area knowledge management community and I seem to run into him in one context or another every few years.

The two articles are SharePoint: The Reality Series: On the hook: the SharePoint ownership imperative Part II and SharePoint The Reality Series: Laying the foundation for your next SharePoint deployment

If I had seen them before, I’m totally blanking on it, and I sort of like the quotes from me that Marc ended up using.  Read the articles for the full context, but here are the snippets.

From SharePoint The Reality Series: Laying the foundation for your next SharePoint deployment:

To Marc Anderson of Sympraxis Consulting, the first misstep is refusing to walk the walk. “The guy who gets religion needs to start practicing it,” he says. Deploying SharePoint successfully means rolling out metrics and measuring your people against them, so that every arrow and line points from pre- to post-implementation. “I’m behaving differently because I see the benefit,” Anderson says.

Architects by nature have to see the bigger picture. The problem with putting IT administrators in charge is that they miss the real workflow between organizations. They look at SharePoint and see a top-down hierarchy. “If your project manager is more concerned about full disks than empty sites, you’ve got the wrong guy in charge,” Anderson maintains.

and from SharePoint: The Reality Series: On the hook: the SharePoint ownership imperative Part II:

“If you look at SharePoint as software, you’re asking for rejection,” says Marc Anderson of Sympraxis Consulting (sympraxisconsulting.com). SharePoint happens to be an ECM tool, but it’s also a work environment. “If it was as simple as flipping a switch, then everyone in the organization would remove e-mail from their company-issued computers and go live on SharePoint,” says Anderson. “Who’s ready on day one for that release?”

But that transparency takes vision. Architects by nature have to see the bigger picture. The problem with putting IT in charge is that they miss the real workflow between organizations, says Anderson. They look at SharePoint and they see a top-down hierarchy. What they miss is its silo-busting potential for routing requisitions and managing critical tasks that falter from one unit to the next. Business managers who route job postings through HR provide a good example of where SharePoint, not e-mail, is the better choice to handle cross-unit tasking.