Trending with SharePoint: The Value of Change
“Obviously, it’s the result of sloppiness. Tools can help with that maintenance of information. But it’s not the tool; it’s the policies,” says Luca. “What is changing is that the cost of not doing a good job is becoming huge. In fact, it can become staggering. The mess that can occur—there are security issues, there is a loss of reputation... the implications are great. We are almost at an inflection point.”
I wondered how high-risk organizations such as the intelligence community and financial services companies were dealing with SharePoint migration. “Organizations are migrating to SharePoint 2013. But as far as ‘SharePoint in the cloud’ (Office 365) goes, it is not happening. Not with the companies I deal with,” asserts Luca. And I can tell you, he deals with some impressive (and large) organizations. “The cloud version of SharePoint is for ‘fringe content’ and perhaps medium-sized companies,” he says.
I suggest that if you mention the term “information governance” to anyone responsible for originating content—devising engineering specifications, building financial investment strategies, drafting a legal brief—chances are that eyes will quickly glaze over. The last thing on their minds is a corporate governance policy—and why should it be?
“Any outside information that can be of value might be of interest to the corporate leadership, but internal information is considered the job of the IT department, maybe the CIO. But not the CEO. I don’t want to generalize, but I don’t think the CEO-level has any idea of the value of information that resides in-house,” believes Luca. I suggested that having findability of important information should be considered a high-priority concern for business leaders. “I perfectly agree,” says Luca. Within certain niches, there is awareness, he asserts. “But inside the corporate world, there isn’t an understanding of how effective dealing with information can be… either internal or external. The most important asset is information, and companies are not using it,” he insists. “Think about how many innovations sit forever inside a corporation. Think of all the money spent on R&D, but they are not intercepting it at the right moment. Things can get lost very fast.”
As he writes in his article, “Limited findability is a strategic liability. And the exponential growth in an organization’s unstructured information only increases this lack of findability risk. If strategically important information cannot be located, the organizational decisions at all levels are not the best they can be. Whether it is a research report, an e-mail thread or supporting documentation, a miss-ing piece of information weakens competitive power and weakens decision making effectiveness. Decisions based on incomplete details are often not the best decisions.”
Measuring Up
We finished our conversation on the issue of so-called “SharePoint sprawl.” Because they are easy to set up, SharePoint instances tend to proliferate, magnifying the problem of document sprawl. “Yeah,” he says. “I don’t mean to badmouth the product. But sprawl can add to the redundancy and limit the sharing of information. It’s definitely a limitation. Having a structure and a metadata solution can help the situation,” he says. I suggest it’s not the fault of the product, but rather the fault of the user. He laughs at that.
Luca is not naïve to the shortcomings of SharePoint. But he is also certain there are solutions. As he writes, “The most important metadata for search and findability are ‘descriptive metadata’ that actually describe what the document is about (title, subject, tags and categories). Because descriptive metadata must be added manually by the document’s creator, this most important metadata is often missing from a document, is not consistent from one user to the next or it does not adhere to the corporate metadata model. In any of these instances, the native metadata capabilities in SharePoint are ineffective and not being used in the best way possible.
“When descriptive metadata are added to documents stored in SharePoint, search immediately becomes much more effective. SharePoint’s native faceted search functionality that enables using a document’s metadata is now able to refine search results based on the content itself, not on generic attributes. Users benefit by being able to search based on what is relevant for them, without having to know who published a specific document or its file name.”
I had one more parting thought, though. I was curious as to his outlook on the “BYOD” discussion, and whether managing information that can (and does) leave the building has any impact on the implementation of software tools. “If the com-
pany has in place a metadata structure, and people could standardize the way documents are treated, it would be less of an issue from an information management perspective,” he says. “I don’t mean to be biased, but if companies had both a policy understanding with employees AND a tool for controlling permissions, access, etc., they could have a security layer on top and a policy in place on the bottom.”
As he puts it: “Maximizing the business value of your SharePoint investment also means investing in the findability and strategic management of your content and its metadata for the long term. At the heart of a winning strategy are two important tools: an effective taxonomy and a rich and precise set of contextually correct, descriptive metadata that adhere to the corporate model.” Sounds good to me. Read on and learn what other companies are doing with their SharePoint implementations, and how to properly leverage them. You may be surprised at the breadth of understanding already being applied. I know I was.