Vander Wal on Sharepoint

If your IT department has not yet deployed Sharepoint get them to read this post from Thomas Vanderwal which includes the following telling quote:

“We went from 5 silos in our organization to hundreds in a month after deploying SharePoint”. They continue, “There is great information being shared and flowing into the system, but we don’t know it exists, nor can we easily share it, nor do much of anything with that information.”

Thomas' post reflects accurately the sort of stories I have been consistently hearing over the last year or so.

Comments

[Julian Elve]

Doesn't surprise me - from what I've seen it reinforces existing boundaries rather than disrupting them.

[Cheryl]

Resonates with my experience too. This quote is no surprise but, to be fair, Sharepoint was designed for specific collaborative team activities and not for easy, transparent sharing. It may solve an immediate problem but creates so many more. Another case of not using the right tool for the job ?

[Nigel]

Don't forget what Clay Shirky says about getting bored with technology.

[Euan]

You're going to have to remind me Nigel .....

[Nigel]

Lifted from Wikipedia ;)

Page 105: Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen.

[Euan]

So maybe starting out boring is an advantage for Sharepoint!

;-)

[Nigel]

Like Milton Keynes you mean? Possibly, I must cure myself of this optimism. It's not natural ;-)

[Jordan Frank]

Ditto! Though the issue isn't isolated to sharepoint. Most enterprise collaboration software (the "social" and the not-social) forms two silos: between content and between workspaces. The result is that despite your efforts to consolidate, there is still inherent fragmentation. Also, most software does not have a strong blog-style timeline function or offer creative ways to view the slices of content that may support any variety of use cases. Read: Enterprise 2.0 and the Importance of Silo Smashing -- http://traction.tractionsoftware.com/traction/permalink/Blog1049