Where do I start?

I was called on the other day to run a briefing session to talk about SharePoint licencing, Hmm! This type of request generally gets me thinking, do they know what they want? and what they are doing?

Well it was evident that there was from the outset of the meeting that there was a bit of confusion as to roles and responsibilities of the people in the room. Not a good sign if this is the way you feel about your own structure, or organisation.

Fortunately I had already prepared my deck as a game of two halves. The first half was talking about their licensing request, as expected, and the second half was all about getting them to focus on, why? and what? of the wider content issues that they would have to face up to.,

I started the second half by asking some questions:

* How does the organisation view information?
* How do senior executives view information?
* Is there an information strategy?
* What understand do we have of how information flows?
* Do you understand the relationship of information to business processes?
* Is there a view that there is a problem?

These are generic questions that if you fail to get a solid answer up front indicate that there is some serious thinking, planning and alignment that needs to go on before you buy software. Then from this opening I gave an outline of five steps to help get started. These steps are as follows:

1. Conduct an Information Assessment (where are you today?)
2. Align content (you need a definition of content first) to People and Process
3. Identifying problems (with the content alignment) and solutions (how can we make it better)
4. Sell the solution (to identified sponsor(s) ) and gaining executive Air Cover
5. Break the overall delivery into manageable steps (build a road map of projects)

And with these steps, always ensure alignment to business objectives and outcomes of the organisation.

The Knowledge Garden a reality.

I have been reviewing one of the early books that I had on web based information management systems. It is called "Managing Knowledge - A Practical web-Based Approach" published by Addison-wesley in 1999. You can probably only find this now in the seconds stores of Amazon or Alibris.

The was based on the work that was done at JDE to create what they called the "Knowledge Garden"What I love about this book is that it is short, (about 107 pages), practical and puts together the relationship of people, content and technology. Nice to see that people come first, after all it is us who deal with the content to make value.

The two key learning's that I got from this book were:

1. The process they used to determine the key areas to work on, and
2. Breaking everything down into a 90 day action plan.

The first part consisted of choosing a single business cycle that can be improved. Yes, that seems like business process improvement doesn't it. What was interesting in the book was that they narrowed down the business cycle to a manageable chunk, with a rider that you need to understand the objective of that business cycle before you start.

As well as identifying the business process the team at JDE then identified the content key to the success of the business cycle, then they mapped the people that need or use this content. The identification of the content as part of the cycle became their Information leverage points. Identifying the people relative to the content and the process then enabled them to key the key stakeholder requirements in a simple and relevant way.

And what is truly amazing all this was built using web based technologies and therefore in '99 was mostly hand crafted. Great work guys !