Recently, we were asked whether a design process for information architecture is required for a Sharepoint implementation. After all, Sharepoint is "ready", right?
This question reveals the gap in understanding of enterprise content management (ECM), or perhaps, the degree to which an easy way out is preferred over conscious planning. This isn't a Microsoft Sharepoint problem.
It's a problem with the mystique created around IT itself. Corporate leaders and managers have come to believe that thinking about their own jobs and accountability is an IT problem. True to form, when it goes wrong, "the system" gets the blame.
MILLIONS WASTED
It is not uncommon to find a leadership group concluding that the IT department bought the wrong system. Millions spent are written off, and millions more spent on a new system. The same result.
Cautionary note: among world class ECM systems, all deliver essentially the same functionality with "fit" being a matter of compatibility with your existing environment. That fit is about the split between configuration and customization, not about core functionality.
No ECM, not even SharePoint, provides turnkey solutions to your needs out of the box. It is the purchaser who must know what they want to achieve, understand that in relation to the IT product, and deliver a result that represents best value in relation to the desired functionality, the approach to configuration and adoption of clearly justified and fully articulated needs for customization.
Information Architecture enables a central source of knowledge about what exists, why and with what relationship to business needs. In the IRM Strategies model, it is a structure on which capturing, tagging and storing content can support management of content in accord with its value, risk and compliance requirements as well as access and searching (findability). The best case scenario grounds achievement of desired outcomes through confident access to captured knowledge that serves a range of corporate needs in a legally defensible way.
The problem with Sharepoint is not that it doesn't meet important criteria for records management (it doesn't, as Microsfot acknowledges). The real problem is that IT departments are quick to support its relative ease of implemetation and off-load responsibility onto managers who install it locally, exchanging a strategic enterprise resource management capability for a strategically distributed roll-out cost that builds, rather than bridges, silos.
If you think that a "knowledge portal" and a "folksonomy" will overcome the problem, well, you've been listening to the wrong "experts".
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"Once it was the mining of ore and gold that generated wealth. Tomorrow it is going to be the mining of minds."
Leif Edvinsson, World's 1st CKO
If business guru Tom Peters is correct in saying that the currency of the 21st Century is knowledge, then any business with an eye on the future needs its staff to invest that currency. In turn, that means every business needs to make its own investment in creating the kind of culture and environment in which knowledge is nurtured, expanded and celebrated. Create the kind of workplace in which your knowledge workers invest their knowledge in your business.
When technology can be harnessed to support learning communities of practice, and when community members--your staff--excel through well designed work-flows that generate authentic and reliable records, you have a recipe for success. People, combined with information, are fundamental.
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