Web 2.0 & SharePoint

Last week, I went with a co-worker to a seminar at Microsoft on social computing with SharePoint. It was an interesting discussion with some very smart people.  A few of the central themes were:

1. There are effectively two hierarchies that exist in every organization: a formal one and an informal one. The formal hierarchy is defined by reporting relationships and is generally well documented. It is also mostly useless. The informal hierarchy is the unwritten relationships that exist between people and forms the basis for how things actually get done. It is the reason why someone who is 4 levels down in the formal hierarchy is actually the most important person in the organization. This hierarchy is terribly served by IT.
2. The tools that we use to collaborate and communicate with all introduce varying levels of social friction that ultimately impair the activity itself.
3. There is an untold amount of tacit knowledge contained in people’s heads and that is flowed in discussions around the water cooler but is not captured or codified. This knowledge tends to disappear when staff leaves or when time erases our memories.

Successful social computing initiatives (i.e. Facebook, Twitter) seem to work because they manage to lower the social friction and distance between people.  And while the average person is using these tools more and more in their personal lives there is a great vacuum in their professional lives because “Corporate IT” has not kept pace.  A great example is the basic fact that the internet looks and works so well and intranets look like high school computer science projects.

SharePoint is a great tool for helping people to collaborate around documents but its “social computing” features (i.e. the My Sites) are still quite primitive.  SharePoint 2010 may bring new tools to the table but ultimately the issues to be resolved are cultural, not technological.

Over the next few months I will be spending considerable effort on attempting to solve some of the social friction problems that exist at my organisation.  How can we collaborate better?  How can we capture tacit information?  How do we capture ideas from the broader community and distil them into action?

Moving to MOSS 2007

Recently my company has undertaken a project with an aim of accomplishing 3 different objectives:

1. Redesign our corporate intranet.
2. Improve office collaboration, document management, and workflow.
3. Implement a new framework for application delivery.

The project began several months ago in an informal way but has recently built up steam and turned into a "real" project. Through a series of events which are beyond the scope of what I'm writing here we've ending up heading down the path to MOSS2007 (or Microsoft Office SharePoint Services for the uninitiated).

What amazes me about the product is the sheer size of it. The documentation alone is jaw dropping. I'm looking at an architecture and planning guide that weighs in at over 600 pages! And that's only part 1 of 2! It's incredible that you can spend years working in and with technology only to be infantilized once again with the latest release of big blob X from company Y every couple of years. Progress... you gotta love it.

Nevertheless, I will say that I do believe in the portal concept. The idea that we have to go to too many places to get the information that we need. The idea that when we go to all these places we often end up being bombarded by far more information than we can process. I'd like to change this, in my small way, by making this project succeed.

So it's off to MOSS we go, where this will stop, nobody knows!