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Is SharePoint too IT-focused?

Editorial Type: Feature     Date: 11-2013    Views: 6938   







Doug Miles, Director of Market Intelligence for AIIM, the global community of information management professionals, looks at enterprise use of Microsoft SharePoint and asks 'Why is SharePoint still a DM solution driven mainly by the CIO?'

AIIM's latest Industry Watch, where we poll our global membership to understand what's taking place in enterprise IT, is an in-depth look at where we are with SharePoint and Document Management.

Although never so designed, SharePoint has come to have a major role as a document management/ECM (enterprise content management) solution for many enterprises. SharePoint has had a major impact on the overall reach of document management and ECM compared to the deployment of earlier systems. Certainly, adoption across the enterprise has been much higher with SharePoint than for other products and usage across multiple content types is broader than for many traditional imaging or document systems.

It is in the area of the "management" part of "DM" that most debate has taken place. We see a lot of debate amongst practitioners around the extent to which SharePoint can solve the content management, records management, and social collaboration needs of the enterprise as a whole.

The arrival of many additional features in the 2013 version of SharePoint has added a further twist to the debate, particularly regarding the ongoing need for customisations and the use of third-party add-on products, as well as the move to cloud.

PRIMARILY A DM SOLUTION?
A surprisingly high ratio (31%) of organisations we polled say SharePoint is their primary DM/ECM solution; 10% report that it's their only one, in fact. All in all, over half (57%) use SharePoint for some form of DM/ECM.

There are a lot of organisations struggling nonetheless. 33% say they are having difficulties bedding down their SharePoint implementation, while for a further 28%, progress has stalled. 40% are moving forward but only 6% describe SharePoint as a "great success."

Meanwhile, much debate has always circled around the gap between the availability of SharePoint within the enterprise compared with its actual use. Beyond that, how many are using it as a collaboration or intranet platform, compared to those storing quantities of content and using it as an ECM or document management system?

Therefore, in our survey of information managers, we specifically asked how long SharePoint has been in use internally as an ECM or DM system. What we can see is that larger organisations were much earlier adopters, with many now having five or more years of experience invested in the product. Meanwhile, small and mid-sized organisations are definitely catching up. This probably reflects a growing acknowledgment of the general need for ECM in smaller businesses over the past few years. Ironically, as smaller organisations are moving to adopt SharePoint for ECM/DM, SharePoint itself has become more capable, but also much more complex.

As a further reflection, perhaps, of the growing adoption of ECM in general, larger and mid-sized organisations are much more likely to have pre-existing ECM systems, whereas smaller organisations are three times more likely to have SharePoint as their sole ECM system.

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM HERE?
The three biggest ongoing issues, according to practitioners, are challenges around user adoption, extending the business scope, and governance. Achieving uniformity of classification and metadata is also a big issue, said respondents.

It is an unfortunate characteristic of most enterprise system deployments that expectations start very high but it can take several years before a DM project can really be deemed a success. SharePoint is no exception. 68% of respondents feel that it is doing the job for them, but many are seeing a shortfall against original hopes.

Perhaps given the often somewhat ad hoc nature of its adoption in most businesses, it is not wholly surprising that 61% of our respondents reported that expectations have not been met - or that progress has ground to a halt. Indeed, 7% feel it has been a failure. In bigger organisations, it is worth noting, the success rate rises to 10% and failures to 4% - possibly reflecting a "too big to fail" element, but also more likely indicating better planning, and certainly better external advice. That being said, a one-in-ten success rate for a technology is still a very disappointing number.

It should also be noted that we found a 30% higher chance of success for those organisations that have a multi-departmental SharePoint ownership structure, something we consider to be important. To that point, given the above figure on stalled or incomplete deployments, we need to ask who in the organisation is currently responsible for driving the system forward. We were told that 34% SharePoint projects are business-driven, including 14% with a multi-departmental steering committee.



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