Applied SharePoint Blog

I am longing for a microsoft user group which meets in south bay to share and discuss the experiences around implementing microsoft technology based solutions. I know one group – Bay.NetUG- which meets in SFO/Pleasanton/Sebastopol while another- Bay Area SharePoint UG- meets in SFO.

Given the bay area traffick , I dont think i can venture out to both these places on a weekday. But why should the traffick situation prevent us from networking and collaborating somewhere near we work and live?

Most of these groups also are discussing a lot of technical issues around technology which are attractive to developers. But we also need groups where we can share real domain or business oriented issues where we can hear different perspectives from IT folks, developers, business users and process SMEs.

It will be great to have a group where a conversation is happenning taking into account many perspectives which makes a technology project successfull. Some projects might not be and should not be “IT projects”, specifically the ones which vouch for process optimization or Business Agility.

If we are talking about creating business process automation and optimization solutions which benefit business end users then we need to listen to these folks as well. It is not sufficient to just have technical folks in a user group meeting talking about workflows, atleast from this persective.

There is also a need for us to better understand challenges and issues faced by business leaders (they are the sponsors and make decisions on spending money on technology projects). If we believe that “educated customer is the best customer”, then we need to educate the business users about how a particular technology or product will address their pain points. This is an opportunity for us to build right set of expectations around the capabilities of a product with these business folks so that they can give due consideration.

One of the biggest reason for failure of IT projects is poor expectation management. We need to be able to justify the value of a technology solution in business terms to be successful.

Then there is also subject of IT portfolio management and GRC (Governance, Risk and Compliance). Business leaders understand that they need technology assistance for an effective GRC but they need to be given  more insight about how IT can help. IT leaders need to do a better job in IT portfolio management and aligning “IT-as-a-service” to various enterprise needs.

All these things are proving to be very complicated and need to be improved upon so that the success rate of technology projects can be improved.

For that, dont we need all these stakeholders represented in a user group to brainstorm?

I think we should have a group which conducts its meeting in Open Space format.

In this age of knowledge management and knowledge harnessing, we got to be able to benefit from open collaboration and knowledge harnessing to improve everyone’s life @ work.

http://connect.microsoft.com/

This is sort of an example of what basic CLP solution can be. Microsoft connect site is a connection point between a consumer and microsoft. You can make suggestions, report a problem, get some resolution, discuss a topic, participate in a survey and write to Microsoft. You can get more info here.

Hopefully internally Microsoft has created a portal for their sales/marketing/support etc staff to get a “wholesome” view on all these issues.

As this example illustrates in addition to my earlier post on Dell, we as consumers need something like CLP. The manufacturers need something like CLP.

I want to communicate with Microsoft about why my Vista startup time is so long and how a faster startup time should be a priority in all OS they create. I want to tell Apple that they should not open up iPhone as a platform and then try to control it through itunes. I want to tell Audi that I love their cars but they need to make cars which give better mileage.

I dont just want to have a “one-way” communication with them, that I do anyway on my blog or any other forums. But I want to have a sense of “two-way” conversation with someone listening to me. I dont want to waste my time but I need to be heard. The manufacturers can may be justify why they make things the way they make, but I need that transparency. Everyone benefits from this.

So what are we waiting for?

I attended Mark Logic User Conference last week in SFO. We are discussing a partnership with Mark Logic and so I thought I would go check it out. I was impressed with the user turnout and passionate support the attendees showed towards the Mark Logic Server.

I did get to attend a few presentations during this, particularly:

• Exploiting Office and OpenXML with Mark Logic Server
• Dynamically Integrating Event Data to Model and Analyze Business Processes
• Keeping Users informed with Alerting
• Launching Video Search at CQ

Though I need to bring myself upto speed with a lot of technical details about Mark Logic, I came away with appreciation for this XML based information storage and discovery product.

A lot of enterprises produce variety of content from brochures to legal documents and need dynamic information aggreation for various business needs. With OfficeXML paving way for Office intgeration with Line of Business systems, a content based intgeration can be made easier by looking at Mark Logic.

Advanced Analytics, MashUps and subject-centric portalsites are some of the applications which can benefit from this content-driven architecture.

Currently Mark Logic is being used by Media and Publishing industry which is often content heavy. But it can be extended to enterprise scenarios to give some help to marketing, engineering, PR, legal and HR departments in their content-hungry or dynamic publishing needs.

Food for thought.heh?

Just a few days ago, I read the following in Wall Street Journal. (I love WSJ)

Dell, by Going Click for Click With Web Posters, Ensured Bloggers Saw Its New Red Mini Laptop

 

Dell Inc. hit a viral-PR home run last week when photos of a not-yet-released computer-a candy-red miniature laptop-swept across the Internet, creating excitement in advance of the release.

     The buzz wasn’t an accident: It was the payoff from a year-long effort by Dell to engage more directly with bloggers and others who write about the company online.

     On the Internet, people can say anything about your business and there’s very little you can do about it. Some businesses try to ignore unflattering blog posts or message-board rants. Others try to make them go away through lawsuits and other techniques. But online information-or disinformation-almost always lives on, as Dell found out three years ago when a popular blogger wrote a series of scathing posts about Dell’s customer service.

     About a year ago, Dell decided to address these comments head on. “Companies want to engage in a conversation with customers when they want to sell them something, but not at any other time,” says Andy Lark, Dell’s vice president of communications. That’s the wrong approach, Mr. Lark says; instead, it’s in a company’s best interest to deal directly with any complaints or criticism on the Internet.

     Today, it’s nearly impossible to find a story or blog entry about Dell that isn’t accompanied by a comment from the company. Dell left a comment in response to a recent post on WSJ.com’s Business Technology Blog about the personal computer maker’s plan to offer premium customer service. Another Dell correspondent wrote an entry about the post on the company’s blog.

     A Dell spokesman posted a lengthy defense of his company in the “comment” section of a recent CNet article. And it isn’t just mainstream media blogs: A Dell spokesman was quick to post a comment when Daddyblogger.com-a parenting site with no obvious tech-bent wrote about a bad experience with Dell. The PC maker says it now has an entire team dedicated to finding and responding to comments about Dell on the Internet.

     Engaging with blogs isn’t just a defensive move. It has also changed the way the company promotes its products. Chief Executive Michael Dell brought the buzz-generating candy-red computer to The Wall Street Journal’s D: All Things Digital conference with the goal of showing it off to some of the bloggers in attendance.

     A writer from Gizmodo, a popular gadget blog, saw the new computer and snapped a few pictures, which he posted on the Internet. The company then posted some official pictures on its own blog, and the story took on a life of its own. Dell’s blog post says Gizmodo, “caught” Michael Dell with the new computer. Mr. Lark says he took the computer to the conference hoping someone would write about it, although he adds, “We didn’t scheme everything up.”

 After reading this, I thought, “aha, here is the business case for an enterprise to have  CLP solution.”  Just see how much Dell is taking the online universe seriously and is investing in just trying to respond to various blogposts. There are gazillions of blogs out there so can you imagine time spent in going after those blogs? How do you keep track of all these comments? You dont even control these blogsites.

How about a company-controlled site for customers where customers can have confidence that their feedback will be counted. That their complaints will not just server as rants but be actually heard by people who matter. A site where customers can belong to a community around  a product or a service and then share their usage patterns or experiences.

From an enterprise perspective, this could be a site where company can engage in conversation with customers. Companies can tackle defamatory and negative remarks effectively. The customer feedback can be then shared across the enterprise to be used in support, product engineering, sales and marketing. You could cros-sale, up-sale, perform effective warranty management etc from a single site. You can create an internal view of the same site where you can show all related information about a volume customer from sales, support and marketing perspective.  You can do predictive demand analytics and then feed that knowledge to your inventory or production management routines.

Add campaign management, offline marketing, online marketing, event marketing etc to this list and the value proposition seems exciting to say the least.

There is no single product out there which can serve all of these needs. To effectively do this, we need  to be mining the enterprise systems for the buried knowledge. One of the effective ways to is to create a custom solution fronted by SharePoint Server but using other integration technologies to create it.

More on the architecture and implmentation later, but how about the business case and the need?

I am making available the PDF of our webinar “Maximize Your SharePoint Investments” here.