Bernard Hennecker's Blog

Introduction

With this post, I’d like to introduce a set of articles where I will share my observations, the tools and techniques we deployed to improve communication and collaboration within our group. It should not be considered or perceived as a set of standard rules for the company I’m working for, but rather as a set of experiences that worked within our group and that may be valuable for other groups or companies.
By documenting those experiences, I not only hope that other people will benefit from the lessons learned but I also hope to get feedback or reactions on the information provided. That would allow to confirm the content by capturing similar observations from other groups or, on the contrary, introduce other approaches or techniques that may be better suited. Hopefully, as a consumer of the information, you would benefit from the experience of several people instead of just one individual.

Background

The many years I spent in the role of knowledge management lead in an international company learned me to live with, support and improve the many different ways people communicate and collaborate. In a big company, this is a given, because people are:

• at different maturity levels when it comes to information technology usage : some can just use email while some others embraced Web 2.0 technologies from the beginning
• talking different languages, using different vocabulary or simply naming the same things differently
• in a different level within the company, meaning they may care about global aspects or on the contrary, concentrate on local (region, country) aspects only
• simply not able to devote a lot of time to communication and collaboration because overloaded or understaffed

In addition, the group they are part of and that need to collaborate with other groups may:

• have different business objectives or measures
• have different rules in terms of communication and collaboration
• use different repositories, tools or technologies

Role

Since those many years, my role has been and still is to design and deploy a collaborative environment that help groups reaching their business objectives by giving them the tools to:

• work collaboratively on content
• capture valuable assets
• publish best practices and official information
• reach or engage with all community members
• access data and information relevant for their group but contained in other repositories

Such role implies a continuous dialog with business leads, subject matter experts and knowledge workers. That is only possible by attending regular group meetings, working on real projects and prototyping solutions addressing their issues and objectives.

Scope

The articles will cover SharePoint design and deployment aspects from a “business” point-of-view and not an IT point-of-view. This means that I will explain the features and technologies we deploy to fulfill our users needs but not the ones that may be of interest for an IT audience. Topics like site collections choices, aggregated views, columns and content types, discussion boards, etc… will be addressed while IT topics like installation, database design or server farm configuration will not be covered.
In the next article, I will introduce the scope of our work and the overall approach used.

See also

SharePoint: the backbone of your information architecture by Rob Koplowitz and Leslie Owens in KMWorld.