The executive dilemma

Aligning your SharePoint 2010 Strategy with your Business Strategy

New and improved social computing features abound in the 2010 release of SharePoint technologies, but these powerful tools should not simply be released on the organizational masses haphazardly. Not because social computing tools are consumer toys that have no place in the enterprise -- the business value of empowering your people to collaborate internally with the same ease that they do on the public Web has been firmly established – but because you need a proper strategy first.

You need to give the people who hold your organizational knowledge in their heads a set of integrated tools for finding (and quickly leveraging) subject matter experts, previous work, lessons learned, and other battle-tested, reusable assets. At the same time, you can’t afford to launch initiatives whose outcomes can’t be clearly traced back to your organization’s overall objectives, mission and vision.

One of your key goals may be, for example, “to be 1st or 2nd in the world in each market where we compete, with a clear focus on innovation.” Before adding a collaboration feature to your SharePoint 2010 rollout, you must be able to explain how its usage will satisfy the goal. Two examples:

SharePoint 2010 user profiles and people search: 

“By allowing our knowledge workers to publicize their skills, interests, training, and past work across the enterprise, we will facilitate intra- and inter-departmental collaboration and sharing of best practices, to out-compete and out-innovate our competition in each key market. Our search tools will accelerate the finding of experts, empowering employees to expand their networks and get help to serve clients faster.”

SharePoint 2010 tagging, notes and content rating: 

 “As employees use SharePoint 2010 to build a large knowledge base of best practices, innovative ideas, sample documents, and links to external content, we’ll have additional tools to evaluate, categorize and expand on that body of content, by adding descriptive tags, comments/questions/new ideas, cross-links, and quality ratings. As the corpus of knowledge grows, it will accelerate the incubation of innovations, approaches and practices, allowing the best ones to rise to the top.”

NLC offers SharePoint 2010 services that encompass:

• Business strategy and planning development including governance and taxonomy
• High-level intranet and portal architecture and wireframes
• Design and information architecture
• Portal user interface design
• End-to-end portal programming services
• Quality assurance
• Training

Want to know more? Read our case studies or contact us for a short discussion on how our network, experience and exceptional approach to your business can help drive the results you dream about.

Navigate through our other Executive Dilemma links:
Driving traffic and conversions
Selecting a content management system