Nice place you have here
Wednesday, December 6, 2006 at 10:40PM In an e-mail correspondence with Tim Spalding from LibraryThing about Enterprise 2.0 I finally put my finger on why I don't like SharePoint.
If social computing is going to be effective in the workplace things have to be different - fundamentally.When we started building this stuff at the BBC we were consciously trying to build the online equivalent of a collection of Cotswold villages with lots of footpaths between them. You know where the pub and church are, you’re comfortable in the environment and you can locate yourself. Corporate systems tend to be more like Milton Keynes. On the surface they’re efficient with lots of straight lines and signposting, but you get lost because everything looks the same.
Using a new tool really does feel like walking into a room and working out what the atmosphere is like, what the other people are like, whether they feel like people I could get on with and whether we will be allowed to take our time to form a relationship and begin to get things done. Dave Snowden was right when he said that you can’t manage knowledge but you can create a knowledge ecology.
I can't put my finger in what it is - the graphics, the language used or the intentions behind the software but I rarely get this feeling from Microsoft stuff especially not SharePoint. They are too good at creating sterile environments run by control freaks who hate messiness, consider conversations unprofessional and rarely understand the true pulse of their organisations.
This stuff may be seen as "business-like" at the moment but I don't believe it will be what business is like in the future.
Reader Comments (16)
http://adamkcarson.wordpress.com/
p.s. Good interview on Gurteen - the best messages are those that are simple and to the point!
But you probably already know this.
If not that, then I'll appreciate another run-through as well.
They recently announced a SharePoint plugin.
http://www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=177884
That'll teach me :)
You're right, we need tools to support new ways of working rather than just sustain traditions. But I'm more concerned about the lack of people who want to walk in that direction and instead cling to their old staid worlds of hierarchy, command-and-control, don't think-just do and kid yourself there will be a pension at the end of it all. If you want to change your work environment, you can bash pretty much any old piece of technology into some sort of shape to suit your purpose, but the organisation has got to want to go there...
Mind you, SharePoint could be a lot less sterile and more fun to use. Unfortunately, thanks to regulation, SOX and co, those deploying it are more concerned with standards, consistency, templates, auditing, managed processes... they think sterile is great :-(
disclaimer: I used to be the UK lead at MS for SharePoint, feel free to accuse me of bias ;-)
Happy New Year!
Take a look at this:
hedkandi.com
Believe it or not, that is SharePoint...
;-)
So it is a mind set thing, but only when the barrier to try is low and with very little risk. Will keep you posted on our work in progress,
Cheers
Bart