Planning Your SharePoint 2010 Upgrade – Part 2: Education
In the early days of SharePoint 2007, I spoke of my excitement about the concept that SharePoint enables all users to be “consumers” AND “producers” of corporate knowledge. That excitement still holds true today. As I now look to SharePoint 2010, my focus has shifted toward a new role offered by this next release, “influencer”.
Here’s my logic… SharePoint 2010, without breaking any NDA restrictions, most certainly will take SharePoint to another level around social computing. I explain ‘social computing’ to friends as tools that offer more and different ways to let you talk and tag. Pretty simple; we all get the Facebook and Twitter concepts. The challenge with social computing inside the firewall is that it is highly focused on corporate content. That means the extended talking and tagging will influence how that content is ultimately ranked, discovered and perceived.
The challenge in leveraging SharePoint 2010 as a social computing platform is to educate ALL users on the process, the intent and the goals. This education sits at the intersection of “What is SharePoint?” and “What do we do?” and ultimately becomes “What are we trying to do with SharePoint?”
Let me take a step back… In my “old days” of knowledge management, companies had knowledge brokers who read everything that was created; they tagged and rated the content with full context around everything that had already been generated. The output was very good; the scalability was (obviously) limited. SharePoint 2007 started to alter this model as content producers were allowed to freely upload and tag documents, typically in specific areas within a portal. SharePoint 2010 stands to take it one step further by allowing content consumers to talk about and tag that content. To me, that begs two key questions:
1. How can we define a business language so everyone labels the same things in the same way? And, do we do this at the organization, department or team level?
2. How do we educate all employees to know how (and when!) to talk and tag as consumers?
Here’s the upside… If we’re all thinking about things in the same way social computing offers a very powerful way to search for or navigate to useful content or people. It becomes an effective accelerant.
Here’s the downside… If we all don’t think about things in the same way social computing dilutes the quality of the repository because you have a small number of matching results in many buckets or inappropriate ranking or associations.
This is why I am taking the role of “influencer” very seriously. It is not a hard concept but it is a highly personal one. That means organizations are best served in thinking through their SharePoint social computing strategy now. That includes not just deciding what functions you enable but how they will be used. This strategy will ultimately lead to direction for employee education (which is different than training!) on the use of new functionality. With that education you stand a far better chance of having the social computing pieces of SharePoint positively influence each user’s experience.