Jonathan Ralton - Governing SharePoint For User Adoption

Editor's Notes

• #2: GOOD AFTERNOON My name’s Jonathan and I’m with a company up in Boston called BlueMetal Architects, a Microsoft partner; I’ve had going on nine years of hands-on SharePoint experience Let’s get a show of hands. Who’s using SharePoint? Keep them up… Who thinks their organization knows enough about SharePoint to manage it well? Who thinks they can find stuff easily in their system? Who thinks their content is useful once they find it?
• #3: I’m going to be talking to you about what I think are some of the key aspects of governance that contribute to user adoption, and these aspects don’t have anything to do with the latest bells and whistles and using shiny objects to get your users using SharePoint effectively. We only have a short amount of time, of course, so… We’re going to briefly discuss what adoption is, How classification of your content can affect it, What SharePoint provides to you to build with, How you might think about governing with this stuff in mind, and What your actual approach might be.
• #4: Can you define adoption concisely in a way that is applicable to all organizations? Your definition is going to be different than your definition.
• #5: You want to think about the actual person sitting at their desk and what their problems are. What do you want this person to do differently?
• #6: What you want that person to do differently should be something that is good if you want them to change the way they behave
• #7: To help that person do something differently, you want to consider your change management strategy This involves not just turning something on and seeing what happens, although sometimes this actually may work—if you’re Apple, for example. If it’s so intuitive, then go ahead, but who thinks that SharePoint is as easy to use as their iPhone?
• #8: Part of this change management strategy will be to encourage this continued behavior We don’t want them to do something differently once, we want that result to be sustained And that’s the system’s responsibility
• #9: So let’s think about this adoption thing; it’s hard to define, and this isn’t by any means a comprehensive definition But I want us to consider what factors might accelerate this holy grail called adoption
• #10: OK, so how can we help our user out? They’re sitting at their desk and they need stuff to do their job.
• #11: Information Architecture is the blueprint for how your content is stored and managed and how users will interact with it It is derived ultimately from your taxonomy, which contributes to your content architecture This is where you add processes, policies, activities… The processes, policies, and activities around managing your content combined with the user interface and user experience is what contributes to all that and becomes your IA
• #12: Why do we talk about how we store content?--it’s not just because it’s a best practice or it’s fun. I find it fun…  This has to do with your overall content strategy.
• #13: Why do you care about a content architecture? You need it if you want to approach effective CM.
• #14: It’s part of a process which is going to help you achieve your content strategy and will form the foundation for content management Why you store your content leads to How you store your content and a well defined CA will lubricate successful CM
• #15: Remember those circles—Information Architecture parts of the whole The real underlying key here is your taxonomy This is how you classify and categorize your content, or how you label and group it
• #16: In talking about these big concepts—content architecture and taxonomy--What are the common threads here? What does taxonomy as part of content architecture look like? It’s structuring And organizing How are we going to get there? We’re grouping things To be able to classify and categorize Why do we work with taxonomy? Again, findability And usability CONTENT
• #17: It’s also about your USERS. If you think about how that person at their desk likes to get to stuff, it’s about half and half. Some people like to follow a map and street signs along the way to get to where they want to go. Others like to search for their content and expect it to come up pretty high in the result set. What kind of person are you? Think about your email. If you’re a filer and have tons of nested folders that you put your emails into, you’re probably a light red ‘navigation’ person. If you’ve got all your emails in your Inbox and anytime you want to find something you type in a keyword or you group and sort by sender, you’re probably a dark red ‘search’ person. You have to consider both approaches in building out your taxonomy.
• #18: Once you’ve located some content… We want some qualitative data about the content to differentiate it from the sea of other documents and blog posts and images…
• #19: The goals, again, are helping users FIND their stuff and USE it effectively.
• #20: Taxonomy is part of the bigger picture; shouldn’t be examined in a vacuum. Other parts of your content architecture will include policies, workflows, etc.
• #21: Again, we’re looking at crafting this content architecture because we want to get to effective CM
• #22: Again, you combine a CA with all the elements of the user experience to comprise your IA
• #23: Let’s get back to what we talked about around adoption for a moment. What your content is, where it is, how it is presented… these will all affect your users’ behavior
• #24: We’re talking about findability and usability Positive experience around these qualities are not the only things that will help, but they will definitely drive adoption
• #25: Our context here is SharePoint of course, so what does SharePoint give to us to work with to implement a good information architecture?
• #26: We have ALL these things to build with in SharePoint, and more… How do we do it right?
• #27: We’ve got metadata, which is, in SharePoint… Your Content Types These are definitions of kinds of content Who has worked with a content type in SharePoint? “a reusable collection of: metadata (columns), workflow, behavior, and other settings for a category of items or documents in a…list or document library” Your Site Columns These are containers for specific kinds of information about your content that will help differentiate it from other content “a reusable column definition, or template, that you can assign to multiple lists across multiple SharePoint sites”
• #28: SharePoint gives us several layers to work with from the farm all the way down to individual items. It’s important to understand what can be configured where and the scope of those decisions. Line of demarcation On-Premise vs. the cloud/Office 365
• #29: When you combine your taxonomy and consider it within the context of your content within SharePoint, this is really where you can start to institute governance
• #30: These are just some of the things that are really useful blades in that Swiss Army Knife known as SharePoint They can all help you with different aspects of governance and influence adoption
• #31: OK, so it’s InfoGovCon—when’s he going to get to the ‘gov’ part? So we are now exposed to what SharePoint can give us out of the box. Do you want to turn all this stuff on and hope for the best?
• #32: The goal is to create Pleasantville.
• #33: But you’re going to end up in the Wild West if you don’t think carefully about the stuff we’re considering today and craft a governance plan that supports and sustains the system.
• #34: Again, CONTENT You need to maintain it throughout its life And you need to consider when you no longer need it, too
• #35: Crafting this plan can be a good thing or it can be a bad thing as far as adoption goes Think about Christian’s opening keynote—do you set up a police state? Can your users self-govern?
• #36: This isn’t a one-time thing. As the system ages, As your organization changes, As your processes develop further, As your users evolve… the plan must evolve. Form a committee and continue to meet about your governance plan.
• #38: Talk to your users The worst IT organizations operate behind a wall Go talk to that person at their desk Don’t assume Don’t prescribe Match SharePoint to the business processes, not the reverse It’s better to try to bend the system as much as possible rather than asking your users to change what they do because the system doesn’t work they way they do Consider your culture Some organizations do well with change and innovation Some do well with strict guidelines Plan before building Don’t just turn SharePoint on and start clicking. Showcase Find some enthusiastic users and help them through solving one problem. Then market it. Revisit Lather, rinse, repeat Don’t walk away after you undertake this effort to never return This may mean time allocation and even budget
• #39: It’s not an option; you need a governance plan for SharePoint It influences adoption Because SharePoint has so many of those blades on the knife Because SharePoint is so malleable It’s a complete change from file shares and managing documents within folder structures—this is working together on content with content in a browser
• #40: Thanks so much for your interest in this and find me later on if you have some questions; I’d love to meet you and talk about what thoughts came up for you as we discussed all this. Reach out to me and check out my blog.