Out and about: Impressions from 2009 Online Conference (part I) - "we've become sharepoint enablers"
Paul Corney, Monday, December 21, 2009

Its that time of the year again when the great and the good of the information industry gather in London for the annual bout of introspection otherwise known as the Online Conference and Exhibition. I was there last week with one of our client’s Ellen Collins of MLA London who was talking about the Information Literacy pilot programme Sparknow had helped run and in particular how “train the trainer” workshops had been conducted for two groups of librarians from across London who handle business enquiries from the public. As an aside it was good to finally meet Anthea Stratigos the CEO and cofounder of Outsell Inc the US based provider of information on the information industry whose forecasts, trend analysis and observations are usually spot on.

This year’s conference was very well attended with over 600 people from nearly 50 countries which must have featured in the organisers decision to venture east and hold a sister event in Hong Kong in March 2011.

As a member of the Executive Advisory Committee who reviews proposals for presentations I am constantly amazed at the range of topics and the plethora of people that submit them. This year a couple stood out for me, the morning sessions on how MS Sharepoint is impacting Communications and km professionals and the keynote on Day 3 from Charlene Li co-Author of Groundswell about the impact of social technologies on business. More of that in another posting.

The impact of Sharepoint (versions 2007 & 2010) was addressed from two viewpoints: that of the consultant guru (Martin White of Intranet Focus) who advises clients on content management and intranets, and the client site (AT Kearney) from the perspectives of km professionals who’ve deployed or rather had it imposed upon them. Martin presented in his usual jocular and informed manner: “2007 it is not free to deploy out of the box – it can eat up agile development resource and needs pulling together”; “Version 2010 is based on a different nomenclature and fewer pillars”. The overriding impression is that it takes a lot of effort to join up the dots, is an art to set up the permissions that are needed to get the full benefits of its collaboration capabilities and requires considerable server capacity. And don’t believe the search function works – it gives highest ranking to MS PowerPoint. Not a totally positive backdrop for the implementation presentations.

The client presentation I’d sum up thus: “we’ve become Sharepoint enablers” which to me felt like the tail (Sharepoint) wagging the dog (the km team). I could buy in to the “sharing knowledge is powerful” tag line and the value of not having to fight IT departments for budget (most big organisations already have Sharepoint) but felt a strange sense of deja vu over the idea that consultants, “Experts”, would have to post information on an internal “My Site” promoting themselves in order to be on client facing teams. Back in the late 90’s Sopheon plc one of the companies I advised built a number of such systems for clients and few were sustainable not because of the software more because they were time consuming to complete and not relied upon. And I can remember Tim Curry a partner of E&Y telling me how difficult they’d found it at that time getting everyone to complete Expert Systems.

What it did suggest to me is that we’ve not moved on much from the “build it and they will come” doctrines of the last decade.. Transformation and change comes from impacting people’s behaviours not by forcing systems upon them and say collaborate – while Sharepoint might get people weaned off email and improve use of discussion groups it is still an assembly of different tools many of whom have been around for some time. It made me think about how Sparknow as a virtual organisation collaborates and the importance of having structured spaces to discuss ideas and work on tenders and assignments.