Susan Hanley is an author, independent consultant and president of Susan Hanley LLC. Susan had the extra pressure of being the first of the keynote speakers. She did a nice job of engaging the crowd and acknowledging the communication gap between English and French speakers. Although she attempted no French, she scored some points mentioning that she attended the University of Montreal.
Susan spent a good amount of time discussing portal adoption and compliance. This is a theme that was covered in depth by several speakers at the recent SharePoint Conference 2008 in Seattle. Being new to SharePoint I have been surprised to hear the amount of conversation on this topic. However, as I work with the SharePoint portal here in the Bamboo office, it's easy to see how massive a problem lack of compliance can be in a large enterprise. If information is difficult to find or poorly labeled, the temptation to give up and seek it outside the portal is virtually irresistable. As Susan said, "there is always a workaround" for end users to avoid the portal and one of the biggest culprits must always be e-mail. Everyone is comfortable with e-mail, and you can't beat the instant gratification of "Your message has been sent."
I found myself thinking about my experience building walking paths in my garden. It's all well and good to design lovely flagstone paths that take people to the areas of my landscape I want visitors to see. However if these paths wander inefficiently or bypass obvious shortcuts to frequent destinations, "natural paths" quickly develop where foot traffic wears down vegetation. It doesn't matter what kind of obstacles you erect to discourage people from taking these shortcuts... like water, people seek out the path of least resistance.
Susan also focused on building the value propostion for potential SharePoint applications with her clients. One of the pillars of value she described as being particularly compelling for many clients is a reduction in the "time to talent". "Time to talent" describes the length of time it takes to bring on a new employee, train them, expose them to background information and start really leveraging their unique expertise. This seems to me a fairly "squishy" and subjective core benefit, although I suppose there are many functional roles (e.g. sales) where this is probably a closely monitored metric.
Susan emphasized a key rule for new SharePoint deployments that seems like a fairly obvious, but potentially deep statement. "Shared content should be published once by the owner and linked to by everyone else." She gave an example of a client that was trying to standardize operations around a fairly dynamic document, and spoke about how difficult it was to get end users to stop circulating local versions. The problem is so obvious, and the fix so straightforward, but again, end users don't walk on our paths or respect our elegant information architecture, they're just trying to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible.
Overall I thought Susan did a great job with her time and helped to set a friendly and productive tone for the show. I didn't get a chance to meet her in person, but she did quickly accept a follow-up friend request on Facebook. I'll have to check out her book... Essential SharePoint 2007.
Posted
Apr 15 2008, 01:17 PM
by
Steve Gaitten
My name is Steve Gaitten, I am Director of Online Operations at Bamboo. My primary mission is to make Bamboo Nation the most useful SharePoint community site on the web. I am also focused on ensuring a world class shopping experience for customers who visit the Bamboo Solutions Online Store. Prior to Bamboo, I spent over a decade at America Online. At AOL my most recent roles included Director of Product Management in the Messaging & Social Media division as well as Managing Editor of AOL Money & Finance. I am a patented inventor, a bad golfer, an enthusiastic horticulturalist and a dog lover.