Information from Anywhere, Any Time
The technology market can be characterized as: softly, unintentionally with originality and nonchalantly with sensibility, in other words, marketers trying to amplify cognitive dissonance about your purchasing decisions.
In reality, the technology market is a bit scarier and can be characterized as: pervasive networks providing information anywhere and at any time; the emergence of new, disruptive business models (Cloud, anyone?); intensifying competition; and customers who require instant information. The ability for a CIO and/or head of IT (hereafter CIO) to consistently manage and deliver information to create positive customer experiences across employees, functional departments and interaction channels has become a differentiating factor for them and their organization; it should be a focus of their strategy, not a byproduct of it.
Unfortunately, typical inherited business environments present obstacles: vertically driven, stove-piped applications and business processes; independent and isolated business units; a variety of business models; extended value chains; multiple networks and platforms; and many customer touch points—in short, a recipe for complexity. Add to this the imperative to leverage existing IT assets, minimize risk in transformation and the desire for incremental system evolution (versus "rip and replace"), and it is no surprise that CIOs need help to manage this complexity.
More and more CIOs are diminishing or ending their organizations' use of "traditional" enterprise content management (ECM) suites and adopting Microsoft SharePoint. Why? Basically, it is due to the fact that Microsoft SharePoint continues to improve its content management and collaboration capabilities; organizations already own Microsoft SharePoint (perhaps at no charge) through enterprise software license agreements with Microsoft; and arguably, Microsoft SharePoint is easier and less expensive to deploy and maintain. Further, CIOs are being driven to do more with fewer resources, but are expected to deliver on the promise of providing information anywhere and at any time, while creating positive customer experiences.
It is hard to argue with CIOs who need to cut costs, reduce IT complexity and eliminate "perceived" redundant systems. I say "perceived" because, on the surface, Microsoft SharePoint does appear to be redundant with other content management systems. But if a CIO is conducting appropriate due diligence, he or she is looking at their organization's IT and business needs in a holistic fashion—focusing on data access, integration, delivery and storage to provide information anywhere and at any time; creating business technology environments that encourage innovation and growth; and delivering on the promise to provide information to create positive customer experiences.
SharePoint has its strengths, but data access, integration, delivery and storage for an enterprisewide content management system is not one of them. If your organization has gone "all-in" with Microsoft SharePoint as the content management system of choice or is considering such a move, there are a few best practices in content management with SharePoint that should be considered to create a business technology environment that encourages innovation and growth.
Federate content across repositories.
With the explosion of user- and application-generated content, CIOs have an ever-increasing number of content repositories scattered throughout their organization including SharePoint sites, business-specific applications, geographic/language-specific repositories, department-based solutions, legacy systems and new repositories created by employees. With such disparate sources of content, it is difficult for employees to know what information is available to them, as well as how to quickly and easily locate the information they need to make operational or strategic decisions. It is just as difficult for IT departments to identify and manage all of the content repositories and adhere to corporate information governance policies. Integrating all content into one master repository is a worthy goal, but not realistic in most cases due to multiple operating platforms, unique line-of-business needs, the cost (both financial and personnel), and the continuing growth of organizations through mergers and acquisitions. Further, CIOs must be careful to stay flexible and adaptable to change, and create business technology environments that encourage innovation and growth, which may be difficult when trying to maintain one centralized repository.
To properly federate all enterprise content and make it available via SharePoint, what is needed is a total content integration and aggregation strategy that provides a consolidated view of content from multiple, disparate repositories, utilizing an open architecture based on standard Web services to ensure interoperability across applications and computing platforms. This approach not only improves productivity by putting all content at users' fingertips, but also dramatically reduces the costs of desktop software by eliminating the need for multiple, proprietary viewers to different content repositories. A robust content integration and aggregation strategy seamlessly and efficiently makes data and content available to users, while delivering content to business applications across the organization. The resulting benefits are striking: reduced IT integration and maintenance costs; information available anywhere and at any time; enhanced customer service; and accelerated decision-making, time-to-market, and revenue growth.
SharePoint user interface.
Organizations that have implemented SharePoint have seen the SharePoint user interface become an increasingly important information access point for employees. As a result, they want to utilize the same search, access and retrieval capabilities they use in "their" implementation of SharePoint with other SharePoint deployments across the organization. They also desire this same functionality for non-SharePoint content stored in external repositories.