Biyernes, Nobyembre 11, 2011

6 ways of making it more likely SharePoint will meet business objectives


It’s obvious that every SharePoint project should meet business objectives.
But how do you go about defining, documenting and communicating those business objectives? Then – how do you tie them to the features that SharePoint offers? In short, how do you make it more likely that SharePoint will line up with and support your business objectives?

Here are six simple rules of thumb.

Rule 1 – Insist on documentation. Colleagues may tell you that a Project Initiation Document isn’t needed. That the bureaucracy is unwarranted. That everyone knows what the business objectives are – so why waste time stating the obvious? That it would be impossible to get something like that approved. None of these objectives are valid. Particularly the last. If disagreements are waiting in the wings, much better to get them out in the open at the start and resolve them. Otherwise they will hit you mid-development, and that will spell trouble. 

Rule 2 – Keep the big picture in view. Information guru Ben Schneiderman has a great mantra: “Big picture first, then zoom in and focus.”  If your objective is to improve customer retention, make sure everyone knows it. All too often, objectives are described at a very narrow and detailed level, and the description focuses on the short term outputs rather than the longer term outcomes.

Rule 3 – At the same time, include enough detail. If the art of strategy rests on knowing the current position, the desired goal, and the route between the two, make sure all three elements are included. Often only one (“where we want to be”) is included – leaving stakeholders to guess at how the desired outcome will be achieved.

Rule 4 – Think of the *contribution* SharePoint will make. If you know of a corporate or business unit strategy, describe it here, then express clearly how SharePoint will contribute to it. If the key aim of the customer service team is to resolve complaints more quickly, think about how SharePoint can help. If the aim, on the other hand, is to reach larger numbers of new customers, think again about SharePoint’s contribution – it could be radically different. Make sure that the link is explicitly made in your documentation.

Rule 5 – Know the target audience. In a past life, I wrote many advertising and marketing briefs, and the target audience section was always one of the most important. Marketing briefs might include not only who the target audience is, but something about how they think and act. The briefs might go further, and specify what the desired response is – to try the product? Get back in touch? Renew a subscription? It may seem unfamiliar to apply these consumer marketing techniques to enterprise audiences, but they can be highly effective. At any rate, developers need to understand target audiences; their needs, objectives and qualities. In our SharePoint consultant approach, a description of target audience often graduates to a set of personas, which in turn leads to a set of tasks. Personas and tasks link business to data architectures. If you prefer, use the more established metaphors of users and use cases.

Rule 6 – Know what success looks like. This one ties in to Rule 4, and is at the heart of SharePoint planning and Design. Success doesn’t simply mean the completion of workflow steps, or the creation of new sites without error messages. You should force yourself to define and commit to some targets. What might be important to your organisation? Content uploaded? Networks built? Downloads? Blog entries written? Or do you have bigger business targets in mind? You might find a framework like the Program Logic Model useful in measuring the success of your project and establishing early on what the leading indicators and KPIs relating to that success might be.

Huwebes, Oktubre 20, 2011

Reckoning the cost of Cloud office apps

There’s plenty of commentary online about the business case for putting office productivity applications in the Cloud. But do the numbers really stack up for a service like Office 365? We did some rough calculations – and found a pretty compelling case.

Let’s imagine you run a 100 person company – large enough, at any rate, for a 2 person IT team (which would not be unusual in a business of that size). Let’s then suppose that in this company you are running 2 servers and 150 PCs. On each of the servers, some software is installed, perhaps Windows Server, Small Business Server and/or Exchange. Each PC runs a copy of Microsoft’s Office productivity software.
Now first of all, let honestly acknowledge that no two organisations will be the same and that some of the hardware and license costs will have been sunk in past capex. But it might also be fair to suppose that such organisations will often wish to upgrade to the latest versions of both.

It’s probably fair to generalise that the largest fixed cost will be in house staff, followed by those depreciating assets in software and hardware.  Annual staff cost could be £35-50,000 per head. While our calculations show that at today’s UK prices, the annual bill for server hardware, plus software for server and client PCs could be in the £20-25,000 range.

The Office 365 alternative, picking the E3 plan, will cost £15.75 per user per month, or £18,900 per year. This gives access to email with archive, messaging, voice/video and document sharing, all from any device, anywhere. It also includes client licenses for Office 2010 Professional +.
So far, so fairy tale. But it’s unlikely that Office 365 will meet all of your computing needs. You may be running some useful in-house databases, for example, that you’d be reluctant to discard. So in the early days, you may opt for a hybrid environment, and this may erode cost advantages.

It’s not just about recurring costs, though. Let’s think about other issues of back up, downtime and errors. Putting your applications in the Cloud will give you a more secure and predictable environment, and will help you to avoid the occasional cost spike that can result from an outage or data disaster (you know, the kind where the whole business has to go into crisis mode to recover – or is cut off from the outside world for a day or two. It does happen.)

Let’s take another scenario: a business downturn and a decision to lay off 30 of your 100 staff. In the old scenario, your IT costs are all fixed (and perhaps paid for up front). With Office 365, you can reduce the number of subscriptions, and make significant cost savings.

The transition to the Cloud also offers an opportunity to cleanse and organize data, and improve business processes and ways of working. This entails some investment, of course, which will alter the cost-benefit analysis. You may well decide to use some external consultancy services to help you transition to the Cloud, by planning your project, configuring an Office 365 implementation, designing SharePoint. But each of these activities will deliver operational improvements.

In conclusion, it seems that the cost-benefit analysis is clear. Depending on where you are in the purchasing cycle, services like Office 365 will save you up-front capex – and the annual cost will be lower. There are many other upside benefits, from stability, through access to the latest software versions, to accessing data anywhere, any time. So what’s stopping you?


See more information on SharePoint at Motif-Consulting.