Organizational Effectiveness – Page 64

SharePoint: The exalted state of good enough?

‘Tis the time of year we’re supposed to give thanks. I’d follow suit, but KJR isn’t about following suit. In that spirit … among the curses of my personal existence is that when I hear just about any four-syllable word or phrase, not setting it to the tune of Oklahoma! is close to impossible. See if you can avoid it.

Halitosis! makes most toothpastes hide away in fear.

It drives your friends away, and your pastor pray

That he sees you in his rear-view mirror …

No? How about:

Folger’s coffee! Is hot, black, bitter, and has caffeine.

It doesn’t taste as good, as coffee should,

But it’s better than drinking Mr. Clean …

See? It’s like a monstrous earworm generator.

Speaking of earworms, you’ll be delighted to know researchers are working tirelessly to figure out what separates earworms from other music. Science marches on. Maybe they’ll find a cure for this horror that afflicts so many.

Don’t bet your life savings. That isn’t how the world works. You and I both know what will really happen: Marketers from around the globe will take advantage of this research to stick their messages ever more firmly in our heads.

If only they’d use their newfound powers for good.

Speaking of using newfound powers for good, last week we raised the question, what ever happened to inexpensive end-user computing (EUC) tools? This used to be a thriving software market segment, with products like dBase, Paradox, FoxPro, Access, DataEase, R:Base, and DataFlex competing on price, features, and performance for the hearts of end-users and independent developers around the world.

Now? There are products, but except for Access, which Microsoft increasingly treats as a forgotten stepchild, they’re too expensive to encourage widespread use, and they lack sufficient market presence to instill confidence in their staying power.

Except, that is, for the worst-explained product in the history of computing, SharePoint.

SharePoint folders! are just like shared folders but more slow.

Their taxonomies, reproduce like fleas, while their contents grow and grow and grow …

MAKE IT STOP!!!

Sorry. Where was I? Oh, that’s right, SharePoint, winner of the Rodney Dangerfield Can’t Get No Respect award ten years running.

Aside from the sludge-like performance of most implementations, the biggest problem with SharePoint is how few people know what it is and can do. Mostly, it’s deployed as a document management solution, without the document management. Which is to say, its taxonomies are managed just like server-based shared folders — they’re mostly ad hoc rather than designed and enforced, so what’s the point?

SharePoint has a raft of other features, which some enterprising training company might profitably list in order of declining visibility. Lord knows I’m not qualified to do this, except for being confident of what the last, least visible features would be: SharePoint provides a reasonably competent set of EUC development tools.

It lets users: Define tables (which for some unaccountable reason SharePoint calls “lists,”); join tables together (SharePoint calls this “linking lists”); create forms (SharePoint does call them “forms,” so that’s something); and define workflows.

And it has integration capabilities.

Not that yours truly understands any of this in enough depth to speak from authority. My personal experience with SharePoint is pretty much limited to using it for sharing project data and documents.

Is SharePoint the best tool for EUC app dev? From a features-and-functionality perspective, almost certainly not. But when evaluating software, features and functionality aren’t the entire ballgame. Whatever its flaws, SharePoint has three significant advantages.

The first is that you’ve probably already licensed it, so the incremental cost of making it available for EUC app dev is going to be less than licensing something else.

Advantage #2: If you already have SharePoint, you have SharePoint administrators and help desk staff who are accustomed to it. You won’t be starting from scratch.

The third advantage is much the same as when you have a repair job to do and the only tools available are a Swiss army knife and a roll of duct tape. They might not be ideal, but they’ll still give you a better result than Band-Aids and chewing gum.

Which is to say, SharePoint might not be the best tool in the drawer, but it probably does achieve the exalted state of good enough.

Email in the news

With the election over, the world’s opinionators have switched their opining from comparing candidates’ horse-race strategies and tactics to pointless post mortems on the same subject.

Pointless because the correct analysis is, what was Clinton thinking, setting up her own email server instead of using Gmail like everyone else?

Last week I promised to get back to business. I am. Because if you filter out all the noise, the Clinton Email Fiasco provides plenty of guidance for the world of organizational dynamics.

Start with an excellent long-form piece by Politico’s Garret Graff titled “What the FBI Files Reveal About Hillary Clinton’s Email Server” (9/30/2016). According to Graff, the FBI’s investigation documents “… depict less a sinister and carefully calculated effort to avoid transparency than a busy and uninterested executive who shows little comfort with even the basics of technology, working with a small, harried inner circle of aides inside a bureaucracy where the IT and classification systems haven’t caught up with how business is conducted in the digital age.”

In broad brush if not detail, the story should sound familiar. Start with Clinton’s technical illiteracy. She apparently doesn’t even know how to use a personal computer. For email, she once learned to use a Blackberry and that was the beginning and end of her tech savviness. Even her staff’s attempts to move her to an iPad or iPhone died on the vine.

Couple that with the sheer volume of emails she had to contend with — you’ll recall they numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Next mix in that the State Department’s secure email facilities were clumsy and antiquated. And that in addition to her Blackberry, Clinton managed much of her email traffic by having aides print out messages for her to read and hand-write responses. But outside the State Department’s facilities this couldn’t be done, so her staff forwarded emails to her private server as a workaround so they could be printed.

The punchline: Substitute your own company’s less-than-tech-savvy executives for Hillary Clinton. Substitute inconvenient or hard-to-use information technology for the State Department’s secure email system. Substitute Gmail and Dropbox for a privately managed email server.

And finally, substitute your technology-use policies for the State Department’s technology-use policies, and your insufficient technology refresh budget for the State Department’s insufficient technology refresh budget.

Get the picture?

Outrage is easy when someone in authority violates the policies everyone else is expected to follow. Empathy is harder.

But as any good business analyst will tell you, empathy is the essential ingredient in information technology design. “Documenting requirements” only gets you so far, as anyone knows who has documented the requirements for secure passwords will tell you. Those requirements are precisely what cause employees to write down their passwords on easily-found Post-It notes.

People have work to do. Executives are people too, often with bigger piles of work than anyone else. And character flaws notwithstanding, your typical executive mostly gets it done.

Executives are, if anything, even more impatient than anyone else regarding obstacles that keep them from doing it.

Regrettably, in my experience at least, at a personal level more executives see information technology as obstacle than see it as an assist, so while they might not be so extreme as to not know how to use a PC, there are plenty who won’t take the time to learn (for example) how to track changes in Word; to use SharePoint in its usual IT-friendly/user-unfriendly configuration; or to use the company’s web conferencing system’s whiteboard feature to facilitate mixed in-person/remote participant meetings.

Not to mention … it’s a whiteboard. How many employees at any level have PCs that let them use a stylus to draw on the whiteboard?

Answer: Very few, because of the rarely recognized chicken/egg nature of so many IT requirements: Few people ask for something because they don’t know it exists; IT doesn’t offer it because nobody asks for it.

So … where does the Clinton Email Fiasco take us?

It’s past time for businesses of all kinds to recognize that inconvenient IT, especially when coupled with a lack of technology savviness, constitutes a significant risk to the business.

Even more, it’s long past time to recognize that dealing with most risks by establishing policies are little more than CYA strategies. They’re pretty much worthless when it comes to preventing or mitigating the risks themselves.

While in your case the fiasco will be less obvious and visible, the lesson is nonetheless just as consequential when profits and brand are at stake as for more minor matters like appealing to voters.