What If You Throw a Party and Nobody Shows Up
I was a panelist at a SharePoint 2010 session last week at the Gilbane Boston Conference. Good times. Best question? I was asked what I thought the biggest risk associated with SharePoint 2010 might be. I told a story from my early days in consulting as a Microsoft Office developer. I was helping a company transition from Lotus 1-2-3 to Excel and was charged with assisting users with the migration of their spreadsheets. During one of these interactions I met a user who (very passionately) explained to me that I could take Lotus 1-2-3 off her office desktop but she would continue to work with Lotus on her home computer because I had no right to tell her how she could do her job better. Whoa! I learned in that moment that the role of an evangelist is to promote adoption… not enforce it.
So, here we sit; a few months away from the launch of SharePoint 2010, a framework that offers so much more business functionality and impact. What’s the (potential) problem? SharePoint 2007 has been so widely adopted, across the entire enterprise, that there exists a comfort in the functionality it delivers. Right? SharePoint’s strength has always been in its simplicity. So now we’re going to beef it up… more flexible content management, better workflow, enhanced search and business intelligence. What’s the one word to summarize? … Overwhelming? One of my fellow panelists, an IT Manager, stated it perfectly when he told the crowd that his ability to promote new features in SharePoint is directly dependent on the business users’ ability to withstand the change. Exactly! Change is always risky. Therefore, lots of change brings lots of risk.
A few months ago I made the bold statement that the upgrade to SharePoint 2010 would be harder than the one from 2003 to 2007. I stand behind that statement. Again, not because the technical piece will pose more challenges but because we have very comfortable business users who will need to be convinced that change (both in process and person) will be required to take full advantage of the “new stuff”. Have a (personalized) plan for your SharePoint 2010 deployment… and share it with everyone! Tell them how you will leverage enhanced tagging, better social tools, etc. Tell them that there is a plan to turn some of this on quickly and introduce more advanced (to you) functionality gradually. If you do that, your users will be excited as we are and will come willingly. If you don’t, you run the risk of having users deviate and develop other ways to meet business needs… Deploying SharePoint 2010 (in an environment where SharePoint 2007 usage was very strong) would then be like throwing a party where nobody shows up.