Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

A New Chapter -- KMA and Sentri

"Even in the perfect world where everyone was equal
I still would own the portal and be working on the SQL."

-- Elvis Costello, "Every Day I Write the Book," with geek liberties taken

I'm excited to announce a new chapter in the direction of the team I've have the good fortune to work with for the last several (nearly six) years, and in my career:  KMA has sold its SharePoint practice to Sentri, Inc.

Starting today, Monday 13 February 2012, I'll be Sentri's General Manager of Strategic Services, with responsibility for Sentri's SharePoint and CRM practice areas. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to build upon what I've spent the past twelve years doing: helping business decision makers improve organizational performance using Microsoft business productivity technologies.

In addition to a strong existing SharePoint practice, Sentri has world-class capabilities around Microsoft core infrastructure and application platform technologies, so the combination of breadth and depth from Sentri and KMA is truly exciting.

When I take stock of where we are and how we've gotten here, I am thankful for the following:

• the time, capital, and wisdom invested in the SharePoint practice by KMA's founders Jorge Rodriguez and David Goldstein. I've learned an incredible amount from them over our time working together.
• the counsel, ideas and support of my business partner Jean Tufts and former colleagues such as Chris McNulty, Sadie Van Buren, Florin Muntean, James Henry, Sean Megley, Liz Hatch, and many others. Their ability to generate great ideas and execute on them with clients was the foundation for much of what we currently are, and they all pushed me to be better than I would have been otherwise.
• the clients and community members who provided constructive accountability as they learned alongside us over several generations of SharePoint product releases.
• the Managed Partner team at Microsoft, including world-class PAM Barrie Mirman, who now has one less partner to manage, and whose insight, energy, focus and commitment are unparalleled anywhere I've seen in Microsoft in my twelve years as a partner.
• the SharePoint community, who has embraced our thought leadership and given us a stage on which to tell our story.
• last but not least, I am thankful for the passion, commitment. and collegiality of KMA's SharePoint team, with whom I look forward to writing the next chapters in this story.

Expect to see more frequent updates via this medium now that the deal is done. It's early in this book, and there are many more chapters to be written. 

SharePoint Saturday Philly -- Recap and Presentation

I had an absolute blast presenting "A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Strategies" at SharePoint Saturday Philly this past weekend.  In addition to the usual friendly, motley band of itinerant SharePoint speakers from various ISVs and consultancies, there were several hundred attendees (about 450 overall). 

As one would expect from a group of people freely giving up their Saturday to learn about SharePoint, folks were engaged and enthusiastic about the subject matter, and my session was full of questions, cross-talk, and attendees sharing their ideas, successes, and challenges.  Their participation certainly made the 75 minutes fly by, and the conversations continued into the hallway and beyond.

I'd like to send a public shout-out to Mike Mukalian, David Mann, and the rest of the organizers, to Chris McNulty, who co-authored the presentation with me when we presented it at SharePoint Saturday - The Conference (DC) last summer, and to Sentri's Jason Himmelstein, with whom I drove down and who filled my brain with many great ideas about future presentation content.

The slides are here: 

A Decade of SharePoint Adoption Best Practices

View more PowerPoint from Mike Gilronan

SharePoint Conference 2011 Recap -- Live Event

KMA was fortunate to have been able to send six people to SPC 2011 in Anaheim, CA last month, and although we've done our share of blogging and presenting about it, we're most pleased to present this week's in-person event for our clients and prospects:  a half-day recap of the conference highlights, presented by colleagues as follows:

• Amy Talhouk summarizing the best of Project Server and SharePoint
• Deanne Damato discussing what's new in InfoPath and workflows
• Karina Vatynskaya joining special guest, Microsoft's Chris Bortlik to discuss patterns and practices in SharePoint adoption
• Derek Cash-Peterson reviewing what we learned about SharePoint for external-facing (extranet and WWW) sites
• Distinguished KMA alumnus and special guest, Quest Software's Chris McNulty demonstrating new capabilities of SQL Server 2012 and PowerView (nee Denali and Crescent, respectively)

I'll be anchoring this shindig and reviewing how organizations are driving productivity via SharePoint's social capabilities. 

We look forward to delivering a crisp rendition of SPC, somehow distilling highlights from 5 days worth of content into 3.5 hours.  Buckle up -- we're gonna move fast!

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 6 (Expert Best Practices)

The second “Best Practices” type of session I attended was SPC245, “Making SharePoint 2010 Collaboration Rock by Increasing Findability” presented by Jornata’s Scott Jamison.  Although he is a principal at a competitor, he is also a top-notch presenter, and I always enjoy and get value from Scott’s presentations.

Clearly vying for the title of “Hardest Working Man in Show Business,” Scott, in his third presentation of the day, blitzed through many specific, practical tips on how to make SharePoint more usable and information more findable, including the following highlights:

• Folders (great for contributors, especially incumbents who have a general sense of where things belong via “tribal knowledge”) vs metadata (great for consumers who understand metadata, but can be tedious for contributors if they have to tag content manually).   One key “Go Do” item Scott frequently advises is to create separate user experiences (via default views) for contributors vs consumers.
• Improving search results by paying attention to how things are named (especially the critical “Title” field) and where stored (e.g., the fewer slashes in the path, the higher-ranked in search)
• Improving search results by measuring their effectiveness with out-of-the-box reports from SharePoint:  search queries that returned no results or no best bets.
• Changing default navigation in simple but effective ways like getting rid of the default left-hand navigation where it works counter to how users will find their way through a portal.

All of the techniques that Scott related were in response to common user challenges that each of us has seen “in the wild,” and they were crisply and artfully presented. 

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 4 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

A second Microsoft roadmap session I attended at last weeks’ SPC was session SPC271, David Pae’s “SharePoint 2010:  Improving Productivity with Social.”  It was actually somewhere between a roadmap session and a case study session, with examples of social computing inside Microsoft (and of course, Contoso) that illustrate where SharePoint 2010 and complementary products can foster social computing initiatives.

David Pae and colleague Paul Javid (Social Product Manager) walked us through the history of social computing, Microsoft’s Enterprise Social Strategy, some specific examples and demonstrations of social capabilities of SharePoint and other complementary Microsoft technologies.

The most noteworthy things from this session:

1. A REALLY cool demo of Lync doing real-time English-Spanish translation of an instant messaging thread – I’m dying to see more of this, and think that the Lync/SharePoint combination provides an unparalleled communications and collaboration platform.
2. A good audience question about a limitation of the “noteboard” capability in SharePoint 2010.  Out of the box, it is not possible to comment on a comment, or to “like” or rate a comment.  [This question underscored how hard the presenters’ job is in a conference where Microsoft has committed to not discuss product futures, and it’s not fair to certain ISVs to discuss/promote others. (cough:  NewsGator!)]
3. The Microsoft products NOT mentioned.  Although Microsoft does a nice job of presenting a story that incorporates SharePoint, Exchange and Lync (on-premise or in-cloud or hybrid), the following technologies with social or collaboration indications were prominently NOT mentioned: 
   1. Skype, a social and collaboration tool with a huge user base, but what feels like a lack of an enterprise integration story ready to be told by Microsoft (whether for statutory or strategic reasons)? 
   2. SharePoint Workspace – how does the offline client, a necessity to many mobile information workers, impact the social computing experience?
   3. OneNote – shared note-taking is at least as social as IM, and the syncing capabilities with SharePoint create interesting opportunities.

Overall, this session provided a solid overview of out-of-the-box social computing capabilities of SharePoint, although not too much of it would be new to our clients running SharePoint 2010.  There will be, however, some more details gleaned from customer case study sessions (still to come)...

Impressions of the 2011 SharePoint Conference, Part 3 (Microsoft Roadmaps)

I grouped sessions I wanted to attend at SPC 2011 into three waves: 

1. Overview/roadmap sessions from Microsoft about areas important to me
2. Expert “best practices” sessions
3. Customer case studies

This is the start of the first wave:   Microsoft overview/roadmap sessions.

The first session I attended Monday was SPC249, “Microsoft’s Vision and Strategy for the Future of Business Intelligence [BI],” featuring speakers Steve Tullis and Kamal Hathi.  In addition to the themes of creativity and discovery, and their clear vision about “democratization” of BI (not new, but clearer and closer than ever), the most interesting things they presented in the session were demonstrations:

1. A demo of Microsoft’s “Pivot” technology for information visualization using images.  The demo showed a sales performance dashboard mashed up with Facebook-style avatar and profile information so that salespeople’s pictures are grouped into red/yellow/green groups based on performance vs goal, and a dashboard user can “pivot” to dynamically regroup the pictures by data elements such as time, region, product line, sales manager, etc. The Pivot technologies add an element of fun to the act of discovering trends in data in a very “self-service” way.  I nevr get tired of seeing these demos, and would love to see KMA’s Mekko Graphics product mashed up with “Pivot” to incorporate rich image data into really advanced charts, like Marimekko charts, in the future.
2. A demo of report creation using “Crescent,” Microsoft’s new tool for ad hoc visual reporting that will ship with SQL Reporting Services in the next version of SQL Server, code-named Denali.  Easy “drag and drop” reporting and time series animations were some of the highlights of this demo.

Steve and Kamal also presented a final illustration of their vision of “democratization” of BI by likening it to slides:

When we more, ahem, “senior” folks needed presentation slides years ago, there was a whole complicated process around creation of artwork, sending them out to professional preparers, and use of specialized equipment such as carousel projectors to show them.  Creation of slide decks has now been simplified enough by products like PowerPoint that most 9 year-olds would have no problem creating a slide deck for a school project.  This is Microsoft’s vision for business intelligence:  rather than having to submit requests to the “report Gods” on high with access to the data warehouse and specialized tools, users are being empowered to work with large data sets themselves, create models and reports quickly and easily, slice and dice the data, and to play with the data to see what they can learn. 

If the business intelligence tools Microsoft is putting out there live up to their promise of insight through promoting play, fun, and discovery, I’m really excited about what business users are going to be able to do with them in the future.

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, part 2: The Revolution Will Be Recorded

Each year, I attend the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston to get some visibility into where social and collaboration technologies are headed.  I attended the keynote speeches Tuesday, comprising eight presentations of 15 minutes each delivered rapid-fire style.  This post is the second of what I expect to be three "echoes" from these keynotes.

Among the most interesting keynote presentations was "Managing People and Process Across A Networked Organization" by Jim Grubb, VP, Corporate Communications Architecture, Chief Demonstration Officer [note: what a great title!], Cisco Systems, Inc., who detailed Cisco's vision for collaboration. Jim discussed the fusion of synchronous collaboration (e.g., voice communications, and live + virtual meetings where parties are interacting with one another in real-time) and asynchronous collaboration (tools and techniques we more frequently associate with Enterprise 2.0, e.g., wikis, blogs, document-level collaboration tools, etc.).

The most interesting, and I dare say chilling, aspect of the keynote was a vision of a world where voice communications can be integrated with asynchronous collaboration tools using the following scenario:

• A meeting, either live or remote, is convened.
• The meeting is recorded for future usage ("we have so many meetings in part because we don't remember what we discussed")
• The meeting proceedings are transcribed, indexed, and stored.
• Meeting proceedings can be searched from collaboration workspaces and portals.

This scenario made me think about the potentially chilling effect of the recording on meeting participation and the free-wheeling, thinking-out-loud, spitballing, serendipitous style of collaboration so important to innovation and the creation of new ideas. This free exchange of ideas between people (also sometimes known as "Ideas Having Sex") is absolutely critical to trust.

If I knew that all of my participation in meetings and conference calls would be recorded, indexed, and forever searchable, I know that I would be far more judicious in what I said, especially in internal conversations.  Perhaps we would get used to it the same way that we are used to being videotaped by ubiquitous surveillance cameras today, or recorded on customer service phone lines, but people at Enterprise 2.0 with whom I chatted about this idea (including one who knows a lot about e-discovery) shared my initial, chilled impression about the potential unintended consequences.

How we manage, culturally, to bridge the inherent conflict between the need to find and record the fruits of our information workers' labors and the need to provide safe places where colleagues can freely share ideas, even bad ones, will be fascinating to watch over the next several years, and will be critical to our success as information workers and knowledge managers. 

How are you planning on balancing these conflicting needs in your organization?

Semantic Taint: Don’t Talk About SharePoint!

I'm reading a GREAT book that's a compilation of articles from the acclaimed journal for word lovers called "Verbatim," (note: link is to the mostly defunct web site) and am really enjoying the linguistic gymnastics that skilled writers have created for my entertainment. 

The latest article I read appears to have been originally published (per this blog) in 1986, and it introduces me to the term "semantic taint." 

Semantic taint is the phenomenon of a word inheriting a "distinctive coloring" (usually negative, sometimes scatalogical or sexual) due to its association with other words.  Some examples include:

• appeasement (forever associated with Munich, and not in a good way)
• diaphragm (there's a great Steve Martin bit about this that I'll leave it to you to find)
• erection (for my friends in construction, of course), etc.

I think that the word "SharePoint" is a dangerous word to use when talking about and building support among business stakeholders for a new collaboration toolset, intranet, extranet, portal, knowledge management system, or digital workplace.  It could either be a foreign, techie-sounding word, or could evoke a technology project from days/years past (hint:  most of these fail -- you know this, right?). Now, SharePoint is a wonderful set of technologies, blessed with phenomenal adoption, a great partner ecosystem, and one of the absolute dominant players in the software world behind it.  It, in many cases, is inevitable.  But, if you are defining your project in terms if SharePoint, YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG.

As many of the speakers discussed at this week's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, start with the business value ("we will create and publish content more efficiently," "we will build a workspace where we can collaborate on documents and other content with our partners," etc.), decide on a platform, and CALL IT SOMETHING ELSE.

“Our SharePoint initiative” conjures images of an IT-driven technology-centric project, while most potential users of SharePoint have never heard of it, and (rightfully) will not care a whit about it unless they understand first how it will make THEIR jobs easier, and THEIR lives better. (Think:  "What's in it for me?")

This is 100-level stuff, but it's both validating (in our jobs as SharePoint consultants) and aggravating to see the same mistakes time and time again.  So, rather than “our SharePoint initiative,” or “the portal,” consider such examples as:

KMANet  -- OK, this one is not super-inventive, but at least it is about the organization, not the technology.  And, it's succinct, which is always important.

Cramerville  -- By, of, and for “creatives” at a top interactive agency, and those who support them.  Great name for a family-owned business with a strong sense of community and great internal brand.

Shmoogle  -- Perhaps not the most Microsoft-friendly, but it’s about the client, not the software, and it evokes a place to go to learn/know everything about the organization and they, a Jewish philanthropic organization, got a kick out of it.

Better yet, make it your choice of business-relevant, user-selected, and fun/memorable title.  Some great resources on this topic are:

• Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 Adoption Best Practices White Paper,
• The Nielsen Norman Group's annual report on best intranets
• The Intranet Benchmarking Forum
• Your local SharePoint Saturday, in the end-user track.

If all else fails, remember the first rule of Fight Club (hover over link if you don't remember)!

Echoes of Enterprise 2.0, Part 1: Don't Re-Tweet the Revolution

Among the highlights of this year’s Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston were the keynote presentations.  The keynotes are always a high point of the conference, and this year’s were remarkable because of the size, complexity, and sophistication of the organizations represented (e.g., Microsoft, Deutche Bank, Eli Lilly, Cisco, Avaya, etc.) , and the expertise of the presenters themselves.

One presentation I found compelling was that of John Stepper, a Managing Director at Deutsche Bank.  John’s theme was “Stop Evangelizing, Start Doing,” and he echoed a central theme of this year’s conference:  BUSINESS VALUE.

One of the sub-themes that resonated with me was the business challenge: “Help me get through compliance,” a common lament of workers in organizations with strict compliance requirements. Compliance adds cost, time, and hassle to many business processes, often because workers aren’t aware of what the compliance group needs from them.  Not surprisingly, this theme has a corollary from compliance workers:  “Help us avoid surprises.”

Social computing at Deutsche Bank transformed compliance processes by making them more transparent, resulting in:

• simpler processes (internal “customers” can help refine processes that they can see and understand), and
• better-qualified projects (with compliance requirements and processes highly visible, higher quality submissions were received, resulting in a reduction of costly iteration/re-submission).

In providing this and other examples of the commercial benefit of social technology within Deutsche Bank, John showed real business transformation and encouraged the audience to seek similar opportunities within their own organization.  Rather than working from a script of best practices, seek out high-value opportunities that are relevant to you.  Or, as he more succinctly put it: 

“Don’t just re-tweet the revolution – start your own.  Change the work!”

[of course, like 50 people in attendance re-tweeted this pithy remark, some more ironically than others]

One additional note on form:  John also benefited from a slide deck that was as simple as it was beautiful, rooted in the Presentation Zen philosophy.  I'll post or tweet a link if I see the deck posted.

The Sounds of (Disconnected) Silence

I had the great pleasure to attend this week's U.S. Open Championship golf tournament at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland.  All in all, it was a remarkable experience on many levels: 

• the immense skill displayed by the players (as of this writing, Rory McIlroy was running away with the tournament),
• the beauty and challenge of a U.S. Open-caliber course, and
• the sheer logistical effort associated with getting approximately 45,000 patrons to and from the event, around the premises etc.

But the most interesting thing to me, something I haven't seen in many years, was an almost total absence of mobile devices:  phones, cameras, PDAs, and the like.  The USGA bans mobile phones and cameras from the Open to prevent distracting sounds at inopportune times, and spectators were told that mobile phones and other devices were not permitted on the grounds or even the shuttle buses.  In fact, we were wanded at the entrance to the club to enforce this, and there were "disallowed items" tents where spectators were forced to check their devices.

The downside:

• People lacked access to information they were used to ("Did Havret win the British Open?" "What's Phil Mickelson's wife's name again?" "What time is it?  I don't wear a watch anymore.").
• Coordinating meetups was exponentially more difficult than it had been since, say, 1995.  Something as simple as "Meet me at the concession stand behind the 7th green" had to be planned out before arriving at Congressional.
• A profusion of what looked like spasms from people continually and reflexively patting their pockets or groping for an absent belt-holstered phone. 

The upside:

• People were more engaged with what was going on around them (one of the great events in golf), and with each other, actually looking one another in the eye and mostly listening when spoken to.
• Other than some "overserved" patrons, people were generally walking in a straight line, with purpose, toward their destination, rather than weaving, head down, oblivious to the flow of people around them.

Overall the effect of this grand social experiment was...refreshing.  I don't know when or where I'll see something similar, but it made me cherish the "unplugged" time even as I counted down the hours until I could tweet and blog about it.

[Note:  A great article in the Washington Post about this phenomenon today provided inspiration for this post.]