Tag: Sharepoint

Analysts on SharePoint 2010

enterpise 2.0

I’m attending the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. I’m sharing my notes from this session.

  • e2 Moderator – Irwin Lazar, Vice President, Communications Research, Nemertes Research
  • Christian Finn, Director of SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft
  • Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group
  • Rob Koplowitz, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

SharePoint is a platform. The move from the 2003 version to the 2007 solidified the treatment as a platform. It is also getting better integrated with the rest of the Microsoft development framework.

SharePoint does require a big overall strategy. It’s not a lightweight deployment. But the deployment of lots of grass-roots deployments of Enterprise 2.0 tools causes lots of governance, privacy and control issues. SharePoint helped manage those issues. But the 2007 was flawed and caused its own sets of problems.

SharePoint 2010 requires top-level decisions and policies before the grass-roots content creation can begin. It’s tough to start small. Maybe the cloud version/SaaS model is better. It’s more agile.

Christian, after sitting quietly, pointed out that software is both a platform and an application. People to be able to use it right out of the box. He admits that SharePoint will not move as fast, but that means the platform is more stable. They are open as a platform, welcoming third-party add-ons to bring additional functionality.

The panelists agreed that SharePoint did a great job of focusing on things like records management. But SharePoint, with its 3 to 4 year development cycle, will always be behind the market. Christian points out that 3 years it the typical adoption cycle for software.

Preparing for the strictest privacy law in the nation: MA Privacy Law 201 CMR 17

INSIGHT_headerforweb3

Join me for a webinar on the Massachusetts Data Privacy Law.

Knowledge Management Associates, LLC is sponsoring a webinar on Preparing for the Strictest Privacy Law in the Nation: MA Privacy Law 201 CMR 17.

  • I will provide an overview of the law.
  • Roberty Boonstra will share some of his best practices around implementation and compliance with the law.
  • Sean Megley, of Knowledge Management Associates, will provide a look at their SharePoint-based compliance management solution to to address 201 CMR 17.00

The webinar will be on July 29, 2009 from 12:30pm – 1:30pm (Boston time). And it’s free. You can register on their webinar registration page.

Compliance for Enterprise 2.0 at Lockheed Martin

mcafee

Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor at Harvard Business School lead a discussion with Christopher Keohane, Social Media Program Product Manager at  Lockheed Martin IS&GS – CIO – Architecture Services and Shawn Dahlen, Social Media Program Manager, Lockheed Martin IS&GS CIO Office to talk about their Unity enterprise 2.0 platform at Lockheed Martin.

The Lockheed Martin guys really caught the attention of the crowd in their smaller session at the 2008 edition of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This earned them a seat on the big stage.

Business Case

They started with the business case. The 9-11 Commission noted that one of the problems was that information was siloed at the intelligence agencies. As a government contractor, Lockheed pays close attention to the government’s position. The appeal of a enterprise 2.0 / collaboration platform was the ability to create content and share it among the team.

In addressing the ROI concern, they made it easy by making a small investment. There was a budget available of a few thousand dollars for experimental projects. They got up and running in a small group with that small investment. [If your investment is small, the return does not have to be big to find a positive ROI. Start small.]

Legal Concerns

They knew legal would have questions and raise concerns. Christopher and Shawn approached them early to help with approval and buy-in. Legal was unfamiliar with the tools. But they were familiar with export laws, data privacy limitations and other considerations that needed to be in place.

Legal was able to help design the controls, processes, and procedures that would need to be in place to make Unity compliant with the laws that affect the internal operations of the company. They did not leave legal as a last minute approval to check the box. They got them engaged to help identify risks and problems.

[If you don’t bring legal into the process and leave them with a late in the process “yes” or “no” decision. You’re going to get a “NO!” Inevitably you will not have addressed an internal policy or regulatory concern. Especially if the project is being run out of the IT group, where they are often not involved in the business processes.]

Evolution versus Revolution

To echo the keynotes on Tuesday, Shawn and Christopher took an approach that was both evolutionary and revolutionary. Migrating from MS Word documents to blogs and wikis is evolutionary. Opening up the information for sharing is revolutionary.

The Generational Issue

Shawn and Christopher pointed out that the generational issue runs both ways when using 2.0 tools. They acknowledge that their team was a bunch of 20-somethings. They had trouble figuring out how to use these tools in the business setting. They had trouble using them to collaborate among themselves.

The older generation and managers of the business understand the business process. They were surprised that heir most prolific bloggers are 40-something senior managers. ( I am not surprised. I had the same experience at my old law firm when we started deploying 2.0 tools. The partners and senior attorneys contributed more information than the younger associates.) It is the seasoned workers who have the knowledge and understand the business needs.  If the tools are easy enough to use, they will use them.

Technology

They used Microsoft’s SharePoint as the platform for Unity. When pushed, they neither endorsed the product nor said anything bad about it. They did acknowledge the difficulty in trying to customize the platform for different groups. The users found the tools easy to use and easy to see the migration from Word to blogs and wikis.

[I had a discussion with Mary Abraham of Above and Beyond KM about the Snake Oil of Social Media.  As we became seasoned in our businesses, we learned to silo information because the technology siloed it for us. Email became our information source and collaboration tool. Email is inherently siloed. Trying to make it open does not work. My theory is that if you want to change the culture, you also need to change the technology tools.]

Summary

Sean and Christopher also found that you need to ground enterprise 2.0 in the needs of the business. Don’t be afraid of social media. Embrace it. Apply it to your business challenges.

McAfee Update

Professor McAfee is leaving Harvard next month to become a Principal Research Scientist within the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management. And his book, Enterprise 2.0, is coming out in the fall. You can download the first chapter for a sneak preview.

Other Coverage

Photo Credit

Thanks to Alex Howard of Digiphile and SearchCompliance.com for giving me permission to use his photo in this blog post.

Martindale-Hubbell’s Counsel to Counsel Forum

lexisnexis

The folks over at Martindale-Hubbell were nice enough to invite me to their latest Counsel to Counsel Forum in Washington D.C. The forum operates under the rule that “what is said in the room stays in the room” so I will not share any details, but there were a few themes that I think I can share.

The intent of Martindale-Hubbell Counsel to Counsel Forums is to bring together senior corporate counsel and a few law firm partners to share best practices in the management of corporate legal departments, provide an opportunity to engage in meaningful dialogue about key issues, and to network in a relaxed atmosphere. I think it accomplished those goals.

The two day forum kicked off with panel discussing challenges to building legal teams and ways to better manage in-house/law firm teams. That lead to a break out session that continued some of the discussions. It became clear that big law firms may not understand the pressures that many in-house legal departments are experiencing. Several attendees noted that their budgets had been dramatically slashed. Any law firm sending out a rate increase notice is going to risk getting fired on the spot.

The second day kicked off on a (high?) note with my panel on Technology, Tools & Knowledge Management for High-Performance Legal Teams 2.0. I was joined by Jeff Brandt and Eugene Weitz. I implored the audience to think beyond email. I think one of the ways to build a better legal team is to build better ways to communicate. My earlier post on Extranets for Law Firm and Client Collaboration – Moving Beyond Email embodied most of my points. As Jessica Lipnack taught me, I tried to get around the room and have everyone introduce themselves and bring up an example. We didn’t get very far in the introductions because the discussion really kicked off. One attendee shared a success story with SharePoint. I shared my love/hate relationship with SharePoint.

We moved on to another session about teams, the characteristics of good teams, the characteristics of bad teams, and some ways to covert your team from bad to good.

Of course there were many interjections about Martindale-Hubbell Connected. Thankfully, they were more like product placements than sales pitches. Of course the Forum was on their dime so Martindale had every right to pitch their product. I skipped one session to speak with some of the folks behind Connected. They seem committed to developing the community and continuing to improve it. My take is that they are struggling with how to deal with Web 2.0 and online communities, just like most companies are struggling with it. But they do see the challenges and the opportunities. They are listening to the criticism, learning, and incorporating suggestions into the development of the platform.

I ended the day by chairing the breakout session on compliance, risk, and governance. The attendees in the session were very diverse with very different needs and different concerns. There were several common themes and concerns. Susan Slisz of LexisNexis did a great job helping the organize the discussion. I think everyone in the session had something they could bring back to their company.

If you have the opportunity to attend a Martindale-Hubbell Counsel to Counsel Forum you should go. It will be well worth your time.

Extranets for Law Firm and Client Collaboration – Moving Beyond Email

project_extranet

One of the problems with collaboration between law firms and their clients is that too much of it happens through email. Email is fast, allows you to send the same message to lots of people, and is inexpensive.

But it is still a set of messages sent back and forth, much like the Pony Express. To figure out what is going on you need to comb through the messages and hope that you end up looking at the latest message. Since email is so fast and so inexpensive, you often end up with a barrage of short ineffective messages.

With email, the message ends up in a different place for the sender and recipient. If I send the email, it is in my sent items and it ends up in the inbox for the recipient. Each recipient may do something different with that email once it’s in their email in-box. Some may pile it on top of the thousands of other emails in their inbox, some may file it in another email folder, some may print and delete, and some may just delete.

There has been talk for years of using extranets to change the way law firms and their clients communicate. Unfortunately, it seems there has been more talking than there have been successful extranets.

The trouble with deploying a successful extranet is finding both an attorney team and a client team that want to share information by using an extranet.

The most common extranet for a legal team is the document war room seen in larger acquisition transactions. There is a great benefit to having the documents in one place, typically with some great security. But they lack the communications tools needed to move it beyond being merely an online fileroom.

An extranet can be poorly organized and messy, making the relevant information hard to find. But organizing the information in a meaningful way can save lots of time and money for both the law firm and the client.

One of challenges for using an extranet platform is deciding which one to use. Should it be sponsored by the law firm or the client? If it is sponsored by the law firm, a few issues arise. One, the law firm will have to allow access to the client’s other law firms working on similar matters or the client will have to work with a different extranet for each of its different law firms. If the client sponsors the extranet, then the client bears the expense and maintenance burden of the extranet platform. There also will be the expense and resources spent on showing the law firm how to use the extranet platform.

One barrier to overcome is that there are a broad variety of possible extranet platforms that operate very differently and provide information in very different ways. Some of the newer 2.0 tools show how the web can be better used as a collaboration space. They also break down some of the barriers to using an extranet. Perhaps the next generation of extranets will be more effective. The answer may be SharePoint. Microsoft is pushing its SharePoint platform causing it to become more pervasive and bringing some of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0 into many business environments. By having a common platform, you could break down some of the barriers to extranet adoption.

How to reduce the cost of audits, operations, training and compliance with SharePoint!

These are my notes from a webinar presented by Knowledge Management Associates, Inc. that featured speaker: Sean Megley, KMA SharePoint Architect and resident “compliantist.”

What contributes to the cost of compliance?:

  • Lack of Tools
  • Ad hoc audits
  • Random frameworks
  • Unreliable results

Sean thinks we should free ourselves from the “tyranny of spreadsheets and email!”

The greater the number of people you can get involved in compliance, the better the results. You want it to be easy, you want to get lots of people involved, and you want it to be part of the workflow. He thinks using SharePoint as a central database and portal effectively centralizes the processes and information.

Being in compliance means that you have evidence of compliance. You need a log to prove the steps you have taken.

Sean went through some more theories of compliance and then moved on to display a model SharePoint portal for compliance. The portal also incorporates InfoPath for replicated business processes. The portal logs the forms and data from InfoPath.

Sean used a wiki as a way to communicate, with links to key documents and policies.

Sean notes that the heart of SharePoint is a document repository. You can store documents and wrap information around the documents.

SharePoint has an alert feature built into its lists and libraries. The alert can trigger action based around compliance. SharePoint will let you know when something is changed or added.

SharePoint has key performance indicators (KPIs) to track controls.

Knowledge Management Associates is offering to pre-package the portal with controls and regulatory requirements built-in as a starting point. For example, he has put the text of a regulation and then mapped it to the controls of the company.

Why SharePoint and not Excel? SharePoint takes information in a spreadsheet and exposes it for other people to see and to allow other inputs and logging of changes.

SharePoint can be used for project management. It has a rudimentary Gannt chart tool.

The big question is whether you want to inflict SharePoint on your co-workers and IT staff.  It can be a beast to manage and some of the 2.0 tools barely work.

See: