SharePoint cures cancer, ends world hunger - still fails to help solve business problems

Well, its been a while. The focus of my work lately has been on content management/ web design stuff, and so my KM learnings have been lean for the past few months. Still, the show goes on.

Anyway, I attended the NSW KM Roundtable yesterday, which was quite interesting. There was a presentation on SharePoint implementation, which wasn't bad, but was predicated on being given the choice of a range of solutions, and picking SP as the one you want. Nothing wrong with that, and more power to people that have the ability and the freedom to do that. What I probably wanted to hear, though, was success stories from people on to whom SP is foisted because their IT area purchased, and then told other areas that they had to use a SP solution for whatever their business need is.

My concern with SP has always been that it is very powerful tool, which can do just about anything that would be required by end users in your standard IT infrastructure, which is great. The problem with that is, for almost all functions, SP ranges from crap to average. EDMS - crap. Blogging - average. Content publishing - average to OK. Content management - average to crap. Wikis - crap. So of course, Sp has the power to convince people that these initiatives are too hard or deliver too little value, not realising that this is the fault of the system, not the idea. This is all aside from the fact that it locks you into a Microsoft solution for everything else, despite what it says on the box (and too be fair to MS, I don't think that's wrong - its not up to the vendor to throw away a competitive advantage to make life easier for you - you have to make them do it).

The driver here, I guess, is one of my favourite and enjoyable irritations - the command and control IT function. This is the practice of an IT area getting enough power to force a solution down everyone else's throat, then use that to leverage even more power by tyrannically controlling what can and can't be used. The IT departments that operate this way better wake up and smell the 21st century (the same way that 'Libraries' have to wake up and smell the 20th Century, and realise that just slapping up a few databases on a website to supplement loaning out books is the fast train to being closed - I'm looking at you Australian corporate libraries!).

If I have a Blackberry, Skype, mobile broadband, and remote access to my work files (and none of these things is particularly expensive - I could do the whole lot for less than $60 a month as well as use them for personal stuff), then I can basically bypass whatever IT solution they roll-out and use whatever the hell I want to do my work, that makes me the most productive.

Ultimately, and going back to the presentation at KMRt, I say if you go out and select SP because its the best match for supporting your business function, well done. I think you've already done better than most by deciding to look for a piece of tech based on a business function. If, however, you go out and buy SP because it makes it easiest to support your IT infrastructure, and expect the business functions to just adapt to it, well then, I hope you get a thrill out of being despised. And don't try to flog it as a solution to a problem just because you've been told it can (say for example, that SharePoint can be you "KM Solution"). I can use my butter-knife as a screwdriver, but that's only because I don't have access to a screwdriver, and I don't need to do a good job, and don't mind having to re-do the work in a few months time. Is that what you really want to do for your KM program (or corporate governance, or records management). SharePoint is good at what its designed to do, but it wasn't designed to do all that much.

A little rambling (what can I say - I'm out of practice), but there you go. I'll blog a little later on the second presentation, and the implications it had for understanding who really shot JFK.