The Goings & Comings of Ant! (Social Recruitment)

I’m outta here!

So, after 3 1/2 years at Trinity I’ve spent the last month weighing up the pro’s and con’s of a great new opportunity and decided that the time and the place and the opportunity are right.

So I’m leaving the great people at Trinity at the end of September.

I’m joining Andrew Woodward (Microsoft SharePoint MVP, Owner & CEO) and James Fisk (CTO) at 21apps as Chief Strategy Officer next month.

21apps is a relaxed, high quality, deep thinking company that enjoys what it does, which is provide companies with the experience, techniques, tools and knowledge to deliver the maximum value from their people, solutions and services.

As an organisation we are currently focussed on adding business value through shared understanding, agile practices, leveraging our deep technical knowledge in the Microsoft stack (in particular SharePoint) to help deliver this value and working with the community to share our knowledge and passion.

21apps also embark on product development that solve real business issues and deliver value like 21scrum which was developed to provide a simple, easy to use, integrated scrum tool that meant companies could do SCRUM without the overhead/waste in using/learning complex products.

I am so excited to be joining Andrew, James and 21apps it’s a scary move going from a 250 strong  Gold Partner to a 3-person SharePoint start-up, but it is absolutely the best thing I could have done at this point in my life.. The opportunities are immense, challenging and just freakin’ awesome!

Interesting (for me) the whole “recruitment” process took a month and was executed completely with Social Media tools (Twitter, blogs & Linkedin) and personal communications both face to face and on the phone.

No CV, no interviews… It all started with just a single Tweet:

AndrewWoody: Fancy working with me and @draken ?http://www.21apps.com/jobs/weneedyou/

Why Facebook and not SharePoint 2010 could become your Intranet for 2010?

Don’t panic, I don’t believe this!

I came across this article on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/Capgemini/status/10021634294
http://www.capgemini.com/technology-blog/2010/03/why_facebook_and_not_sharepoin.php

I have to admit, I don’t particularly agree with the premise for the article. Ignoring the fact that a lot of companies don’t trust their employees to access FaceBook in work (so they turn to accessing anyway over their mobile devices!), what I don’t like is that it makes the assumption that SharePoint isn’t a good platform for an Intranet which of course it is.. it’s awesome and with the launch of SharePoint 2010 in May, the Intranet features, including a heap of social features which I feel are key in bringing context into our everyday activities, are immensely strong.

The article states that FaceBook (obviously) doesn’t support integration into your back-end systems and probably isn’t the right location for confidential documents… Right so you’re telling me that I should have an external FaceBook Intranet for news, information and connections (internal and external) and then separate systems for all the other stuff I do each and every day??

I don’t think so guys… maybe in the “old days” with SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 that may be a credible approach as the social/connections focussed elements were weak, but SharePoint 2010 is a totally different beast.

What I do agree with in the post is that for Intranets:

• Adoption is key
• Building engagement with business partners is a key differentiator in business (Extranet AND other social tools)
• Utilise platforms rather than custom build

With FaceBook not being a good platform from a security perspective, then why not consider SharePoint Online, that platform certainly meets the needs of this requirement that they state at the end of the article:

Save money, thrive adoption. Not every successful solution has to start inside your firewall or should be custom build. Use the tools your colleagues already know, use the tools that they already selected as the tools they prefer to use.

Finally, an interestingly, what they also say is:

“…If that holds you back to go full fledge into Facebook, just use your Facebook group as a portal to get your colleagues to the news on the Intranet (which could be based on SharePoint 2010)…”

Now that is a more sensible idea…

• Build a social presence as a portal…
• Use the social features of a decent platform such as FaceBook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Ning etc to engage with new customers
• Use this as a launch pad for employees to an Internal Intranet (SharePoint 2010)
• Use this as a launch pad for partner/clients to an extranet (SharePoint 2010)

Sorted! This approach give you a great transparent presence, and as much relevant content and business processes that the platform can deliver, and hands you off neatly to internal systems such as SharePoint 2010 for the really rich, contextual intranet (or extranet) functionality you need…

Make sense?

Is SharePoint a Huge Pulsating Beast?

Ok, so at the last Trinity SharePoint 2010 event it is true that I stated, when talking about the huge value around context and knowledge that can be captured within SharePoint, that, and I quote):

“…SharePoint is a huge pulsating beast…”

OK, in hindsight that may not have been the best way to articulate SharePoint’s value but in my mind at that second it was accurate, without:

• Governance
• Clear requirements
• Information architecture
• Stakeholder buy-in
• User adoption

Then SharePoint truly can be a beast when it’s left to it’s own device with your clients…

The following post is hopefully a better articulated version of “the beast”, that should make more sense!

So, when we deploy SharePoint our hopes, requirements and vision are that it will become a business tool that the whole organisation embraces, and with this large-scale adoption will come a deep pool of knowledge, data, information, debate and context.

The problem is, unless sufficient thought has been made around governance, information architecture, search, meta data etc, finding information in platforms like SharePoint can be like throwing a pebble into a fast moving stream, finding the exact same pebble again can be extremely challenging!

SharePoint 2007 is therefore very analogous to a complex maze of tributaries meandering towards the sea but going nowhere particularly fast… A fair bit of water (knowledge) flows through the tributaries, but there are also many twists, turns and dead-ends.

With SharePoint 2010, there are countless more ways in which knowledge, information and data can manifest itself, its more like fast flowing rivers on their way to the ocean. All that information flowing through the system can be difficult to take advantage of, but with SharePoint 2010, there are also an increasing number of ways in which you can harness the knowledge-flow, speed it up, slow it down, aggregate it, re-use it and give purpose to it (context). 

So SharePoint in the future is going to allow us a greater level of control (governance) to properly harness the flow (derive business value), but we won’t ever fully stop that knowledge branching out, being used in ways we hadn’t anticipated and we should plan for and accept this uncertainty…

So I’m going to stop referring to SharePoint as a “huge pulsating beast”, and start referring to SharePoint, and specifically SharePoint 2010 as:

“…a river of knowledge that we can’t control, but we must harness…”

SharePoint Perception

SharePoint is a “large beast”, it can deliver a wonderful array of functionality, however I still encounter clients and organisations in the wider world that feel that SharePoint just doesn’t deliver on its promises... But why?

To me it fundamentally comes down to 3 things:

1. Wrong starting point 
Please don’t do a “SharePoint Project” any more! Technology never solves problems, it facilitates the organisation or end user to achieve, SharePoint is no different. Do a business change project, sort out a business process do something for your business.

2. No Directions
Just because SharePoint has a stack of functionality doesn’t mean you can go into a project without a clearly defined business vision and set of requirements, if you do the project will almost always fail to deliver.

3. Rose-tinted Glasses 
Less obvious but equally damaging, is end-user perception, especially when your “showing” SharePoint to a client. Be it a causal “look this is what SharePoint does”, a formal pitch or an event you must be clear to clients as to what your showing, how far from OOTB it is and how they get what your showing. Office Versions, customisations, add-ins, ways of working all fundamentally change the SharePoint experience, what it can deliver and how much it’s going to cost to deliver.

“Lead with the business and be transparent; then think about SharePoint”