Understand, I don’t have anything against SharePoint, but I keep hearing all about SharePoint and not what it can do.
To hear people tell it, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread and canned beer.
And while it’s true that it’s an amazing multifaceted tool,there are other reasons it’s such a popular topic of conversation.
In mostbusinesses, one of the biggest risks has to do with being sure everybody knows which piece of information is the real one and where it can be found – two “must-haves” that are impinged by using share drives like your shared drive and unmanaged repositories like (dare I say it?) an ungoverned SharePoint repository.Remember, the issue isn’t SharePoint or any other stack for that matter. It’s about ensuring information consistency toensure reliability, especially when the same bits of data are used in multiple business processes. The good news given the work required to set them up is that they can be reused when developing new applications, so the work doesn’t have to be redone every time.
We’re all so wrapped up in doing what we do every day that we can easily forget that we’re doing it for some sort of greater overall good. Like the blind men and the elephant, we’re steeped in what’s right in front of us – and generally speaking that’s OK!But when it comes to talking about better ways to manage and utilize information, it’s important that we take a conceptual step backwards to get a better perspective on the ocean we’re swimming in.Image: http://mappingignorance.org/fx/media/2013/07/Figura-11.jpg
Doing so brings us to my “Big Box” Theory of Information Management, which says that the overriding functional goal is to get all the organization’s data to look and act like it is stored in one big box that everyone can access when they need to.