We all live in hyper content world. With digital revolution that has started since Turing machine has caught up everybody and every organization. The volume of data that we produce and consume now a days is phenomenal. This created a need for data management systems. Enterprises needed much more than just data management solution. They required user and role management, search, workflow etc. on top of data management. Since such enterprises have enough products from Microsoft running in their premises or cloud they look up to SharePoint as intranet solution which will address all their needs from data management to business process management.
SharePoint packs everything that is required within to be a great intranet solution. However, in real world just features don’t build great systems. A complete thought through plan is equally important. I am sharing some common SharePoint implementation failure reasons.
- Lack of information and knowledge management skills: The people who are assigned the task of implementation of the SharePoint system looked at it as a software and not a solution that will help people do certain things. So their sole objective is the make things work against given checklist than the usability of the solution for the people who will eventually use it. They themselves lack the knowledge management skills and hence they don’t understand the value of knowledge.
- Undefined requirement: Most of the enterprises do not know what has to be achieved and way to achieve it. The management’s expectations are never captured in a constructive way or documented and articulated for the people who would be implementing SharePoint for the organization.
- Lack of technical skills: In-house SharePoint administrators lack technical capability to implement as they don’t have enough implementation experience and they are implementing it for the first time in their organization.
- Less user adoption: People are happy working in their old ways. They resist change. So they look at SharePoint implementation as additional workload. Moreover, since IT systems bring in transparency some people are hesitant to adopt to new system.
- Fragmented addition of content to system: The usability of SharePoint system depends on the value and volume of data present in it. Since not many update the system with rich information the consumers of the system are not fed with latest and up-to-date information when they look for it. This create mistrust and they stop relying on the system for information. This further impacts the adoption of SharePoint.
Over a decade and half experience working with enterprise systems has given me wisdom nuggets for successful implementation of enterprise applications. Avoiding above mentioned common reasons for failure you can hope for successful SharePoint initiative.