Guest Article
Evolving Company Culture Starts With a 'SharePoint'
by Viral N. Tarpara
One of the most difficult tasks that IT departments and businesses have with managing a company is to evolve culture. Each company has its own way of doing things whether it is phrasing emails for internal communication or sharing information across workgroups. The challenge arises when companies do not improve their workflow practices and behaviour.
Take, for instance, a simple process of exchanging marketing material. The 1990's way of doing things was to use the company's Exchange server and Outlook; the problem nowadays is that rich content is much larger than it was in the past, and more frequent. Exchange was never suited to optimally handle 10-20MB files. With the advent of the USB flash drive, many employees took it upon themselves to backup and move information because the tools they possessed were just not adequate. Would you consider this an appropriate business culture?
The last universal cultural change occurred with email becoming mainstream. The next dramatic shift will occur with a powerful collaboration infrastructure, i.e. SharePoint. More and more companies are realising the importance of developing a managed collaboration environment.
So what is SharePoint? SharePoint is essentially three things:
1. It is an online portal and search engine
2. It is an enterprise content management system
3. It is a collaboration and business intelligence platform
Chances are if you are a business, you are looking for one of these things. The reason is because there is a need to change the established culture of the company. The current practices are not conducive to growing the business.
Let's take another example of business communications culture. As a company grows beyond 10 employees, people lose the day-to-day information flow that would accompany a small team. As companies grow, the typical 'word of mouth' approach fails to fully capture the state of the business. Expand this to a medium-size business with multiple siloed departments and communication gaps easily appear. Finance is no longer interested in the day-to-day dealings with marketing, nor should they be, but the important thing they do lose is the business intelligence. The ability to holistically view what each department values is critical in breaking down silos. Having an intranet portal that educates all employees about scorecards and events in areas of the business provides creative insight, knowledge and objectivity. Preserving the visibility of organisations so that employees can discover information prevents social fragmentation, hence avoiding the creation of destructive sub-cultures.
To read the rest of this article, visit my blog.
Viral N. Tarpara
IT Pro Evangelist - Office, SharePoint, Groove || Developer Platform & Evangelism
viralta@microsoft.com
http://blogs.technet.com/tarpara
Previously Published in the 'TechNet Newsletter'
Used with permission © 2007 Microsoft Corporation
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Microsoft Small Business Server 2003
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