Skilful Minds

Social Software Stack

The title for this post is drawn from a recent assessment of SharePoint 2007 offered on Thomas Vander Wal’s bog, Personal InfoCloud. Thomas’ post, as always, offers a unique point of view on what Enterprise 2.0 consists and, specifically, how SharePoint measures up. He isn’t offering his own formal assessment as much as reporting the stories clients and potential clients shared with him over the past couple of years. The social software stack, in particular the difference between collective understanding and collaborative understanding, frames Vander Wal’s perspective.

Given SharePoint’s widespread use, and the growing interest in applying social media applications to collaboration challenges in organizations, Thomas’ discussion deserves wider attention. His overall impression is well summarized in the following point.

SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside [the] enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focussed on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organizations have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.

This older, prescribed category of enterprise tool needs is where we have been in the past, but this is not where organizations are moving to and trying to get to with Enterprise 2.0 mindsets and tools. The new approach is toward embracing the shift toward horizontal organizations, open sharing, self-organizing groups around subjects that matter to individuals as well as the organization. These new approaches are filling gaps that have long existed and need resolution.

In other words, SharePoint works well for situations in which defined groups need to reach a collaborative understanding of project requirements, their role in achieving those objectives, and what success means for the project. It works less well in providing resources allowing people across the enterprise, and across teams or departments, to discover connections with others and develop social relationships for networking together in ways that meet both personal and organizational challenges.

Hammers and Nails: Extending the Social Software Stack

Thomas’ point about hierarchical/horizontal challenges of collaboration is an organizational analog to the old saw about hammers and problems, i.e. someone with a hammer sees every problem as a nail, or something like that–you get the idea. A tool set biased towards connecting people and sharing information via hierarchical relationships between organizational positions does not readily afford solving problems largely based in horizontal relationships between people. A similar dilemma exists in the eLearning space between the top-down, objectives focus of learning content developed for Learning Management Systems (LMS) and the horizontal emphasis of eLearning 2.0 applications focused on collaboration and performance support.

Thomas observes that SharePoint 2007 seems to multiply silos of information in organizations using it rather than diminishing them and, as he notes, “Nearly every organization has deployed SharePoint in some form or another.” He also points to a recent report on SharePoint usage patternsdone by AIIM and Oracle. Its overall findings are as follows:

83% currently use, or are planning to use, SharePoint

SharePoint is more widely deployed at the workgroup or department level

75% said implementation of SharePoint took one year or less, which would make sense considering

47% use it primarily for File Sharing (and/or as an internal Portal – again 47%)

Few use it for complex business processes, records management or digital asset management

It is seen as a component of a larger Enterprise Content Management strategy

47% said they would use it as an Extranet/Internet solution (whereas 22% do already) – this was one a little surprising

You can also get a free copy of the full report. A good sense of how SharePoint works to support teams is available in Michael Sampson’s Seamless Teamwork, though you won’t see much discussion in the book about the limitations of SharePoint in enabling discovery of common interests with other people across enterprises, or knowledge across teams.

The overall organizational response to recognition of SharePoint’s limitations as a platform for the social networking required by Enterprise 2.0 is described by Vander Wal.

The first step many organizations take with SharePoint after realizing it does not easily, or even with an abundance of effort, do the expected social software components is to start getting solid proven services and start plugging them in. Many tool makers have taken their great products an made it quite easy to plug them into the SharePoint platform. Want a great wiki tool, not the horrible wiki “template”, then Confluence or Socialtext is added. Need a great social tagging/bookmarking tool that ties into search (this starts enabling finding the good information in SharePoint’s micro-silos), then Connectbeam is added.

It is important to note that as social networking tools continue to develop new ways of connecting, such as the growing recognition of Twitter’s usefulness to collective awareness of a person’s presence and mundane activities, even vendors like SocialText see it necessary to enhance their integration of the social software stack with features such as SocialText Signals and SocialText Desktop. Vander Wal’s key question is whether enterprises using SharePoint will continue to bolt new applications on it to enhance its social capabilities, or move on to totally new platforms entirely.

If your organization uses SharePoint, how true do the points outlined above seem to you? Has your organization added social networking applications to SharePoint?

Posted by Larry R. Irons

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 18th, 2009 at 2:28 am and is filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.