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SPC’09 Takeaways: What Impressed Me

I just got back from the SharePoint 2009 Conference in Las Vegas, where Microsoft unveiled SharePoint 2010.

There was an incredible amount of information presented during the event, and no human can hope to digest it given the pace of the activity. But with a little bit of reflection, I came up with a list of concepts and explicit improvements that really caught my attention.

(My perspective is as a reasonably experienced end user of SharePoint. I have a consulting business, and we help people solve problems with SharePoint. I also have a professional background in library and information science.)

UI: Fluidity, Browser Compatibility, Accessibility
The ActiveX controls and constant page refreshes of today become AJAX controls and contextual ribbon changes in 2010. It’s a bit of a shock at first, but it makes the user experience much more fluid and more like other web platforms out there.

Currently, SharePoint plays well with Internet Explorer, and not so well with other browsers. This is really no longer an issue in 2010; the web client experience is interchangeable across browsers and operating systems. Throw in WCAG 2.0 compliance and new multilingual support, and you’ve got a significantly improved functional web platform to build around.

Managed Metadata and Enterprise Content Types
Content types are no longer bound to site collections, so you can specify a single content type for an entire organization, and publish it for consumption across all server farms. Imagine a university that needed to update a grant application form for all units based on a new federal reporting requirement. Change form, click publish, and have the service application pick it up across all units overnight.

The managed metadata infrastructure that underlies 2010 is breathtaking. (OK, I said I was a librarian!) Users need structured taxonomy to both find things and to enable sensible processes around similar items; if every site owner describes items differently, there is no way to reliably handle search, workflow, archiving, and all sorts of other things that people want to do with SharePoint. Ignoring taxonomy is just too easy a hole to dig yourself into in 2007. In SharePoint 2010, management of taxonomies across the  organization is built into the product. It is a significant achievement.

Some of the result: Users have a rich searching and browsing interface to managed taxonomies that is visible from the web or from Office applications, and can add terms within the hierarchy as they are working on documents. There is a “merge term” feature that automatically creates synonyms and linkages. Users can import terms from Excel sheets. Multilingual support is available to allow for on-the-fly display of metadata in a localized language. The feature list just goes on and on, and all of this is brand new to the SharePoint ecosystem.

The combined ability to manage content types for all site collections and integrate managed taxonomies is big enough. But combine all this top-down stuff with the bottom-up social metadata tools (tagging, rating, and notes), and Microsoft offers a really powerful story for collaborative metadata.

Workflow Portability
The notion of portability of custom workflows is another interesting story. SharePoint Designer 2010 can export workflows to files that can be shared across sites, site collections, and organizations. So, consultants like me don’t need login access to customer sites to build workflow; in fact, having canned workflows for typical problem sets becomes feasible.

Another really great part of this story is the ability to exchange workflows between SharePoint Designer and Visio 2010. It’s an import/export operation, but the result means all sorts of interesting scenarios are possible. Imagine a business analyst building a process flow in Visio, then passing it to IT for deployment. IT imports the file into SharePoint Designer, which automatically generates a custom workflow from it. IT adds some rules about when it should fire, attaches it to a content type, and enables that content type for an entire site collection.

External Lists and the Business Connectivity Service
Currently, getting any functional value from the Business Data Catalog can be a challenge. The fact that it is read-only and requires a lot of setup work makes it a big hurdle for many organizations. In 2010, this changes quite a bit. The new Business Connectivity Service defines an external content type and list to talk to external data sources. This is then presented back to SharePoint like any other list data, and includes create, read, update, delete, search and offline access as a result. So, you can give users the ability to write changes back to a SQL database through SharePoint, with all its customizable forms and workflow to go along with it.

InfoPath Forms integration
In 2010 it is brain-dead easy to develop and use InfoPath forms as standard SharePoint list forms. Literally, there is a “Customize Form” button in a SharePoint 2010 list display that opens the form in InfoPath, where you can work on it and then publish it right to your site. This can include all sorts of nice features like conditional formatting, data validation, and filtering using input data selected on the same form. I almost cried when I saw this demonstrated. That’s how painful form customization is today.

Also, there is now a standard InfoPath form web part, and solutions can be rolled up for export just like with SharePoint Designer workflow.

Other new cool things I didn’t get a lot of detail around, but that sound really great:

• Visio Services: There is a new visualization service that uses Visio as an engine. One really cool artifact of this is that the workflow history on an item now displays the workflow in a graphical model, and spells out exactly where in the process the item is. (If Jane from Accounting is holding things up by not approving a form, the visualization shows you her name and a stalled process!)

• Office 2010 Backstage: All the metadata associated with an item is now exposed within the Office client in a nice display area called Backstage. Managed terms, people, tags, ratings, all get rolled up into a single view.

• OneNote 2010 web application: There are web versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Nice, but not a lot of shine there, frankly. But the OneNote web version offers some interesting online collaboration possibilities: whiteboarding, video integration, drawing tools… I want to check this out some more.

• REST support: SharePoint data is exposed via REST in 2010. This includes the MySite activity feed, which is Atom 2.0. I am hardly a mashup expert, but having interoperability options like this seems vital.

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Recently I had occasion to mark the one-year anniversary of the creation of a community web site I helped organize while working at the University of Washington.

It’s a community of Information Technology support experts who provide support for UW Exchange, a centrally-managed Microsoft Exchange service used by around 4000 staff members from across dozens of departments at the university.

When I checked in on the site, I found that dozens of staff from across campus were actively using it to share solutions and report issues. It remains an active community, and that fact got me to thinking about why this site was still active, when many other efforts to establish community fail.

Model drives need, need forms community

In part, it’s because there are advocates and leaders who provide such good discussions and answers. Good content is certainly a prerequisite for participation in a discussion. But this situation goes a bit deeper than that.

It’s also because of how we organized the support flow for the service. Support teams from diverse units all work directly with end users. They know them best, and are best positioned to provide just-in-time answers. The support teams, in turn, have a narrowly defined escalation path for problems that require back-end attention. This approach allows scalability and flexibility, and helps keep costs down for everyone.

This model represented a real change in how things were done, both for the organization where I worked (we ran the service) and for our customers.

The approach also had a nifty side effect of creating a natural community of IT support staff from an array of different organizations who tackle similar problems, but perhaps haven’t solved them on their own before. As we built out the model for this distributed structure for support, we quickly realized that “first tier” of support would need a dedicated space to use for their specific needs. And we figured out that they had to own that space, in the sense of driving how it was to be used and being responsible for its maintenance.

Helping people in that role was the fundamental requirement for the site. It had to be a place where busy IT support staff could find answers quickly, but also ask for help from other people similar to themselves. It needed to be peer-based and solution-oriented, with a little bit of information to orient new folks to the service.

And it had to be easy for people to contribute: allowing people to post to a discussion list by using email was critical for early adoption, and the ease with which people can upload Office files or migration scripts helped keep it active.

We picked SharePoint for a host environment. This was helpful, but a more important sequence of events was getting key customer participants to take ownership of the effort.

Cultivate ownership from the beginning

Before we made any technical decisions, I got a meeting together with 3 key users of the site. They were responsible for the front line support for their departments, but in a very real way they also were responsible for the success of the support community (as by extension, the service as a whole).

They understood the importance of the community site immediately, and they quickly galvanized around the basic technical requirements in a way that the organization running the service never could have. I still think of that meeting as one of the critical events in the success of the growth of the service over a year, going from 800 to 4000 users. Without such active ownership of the community by customers themselves, the effort would have fizzled out and we would have lost a chance to build a new way of doing things.

After working up a prototype, we had one planning meeting to create a taxonomy of FAQ keywords and to clarify ownership and maintenance roles. That small group of 3 early adopters of the Exchange service took ownership, and that was enough to get it off the ground and sustain it as an active community.

So, after thinking about it, I think the site remains active a year later because:

• There is a compelling need.
• A natural, reasonably sized community of contributors exists.
• The tool we used does enough, but not too much.
• There is no technical barrier to contribution.
• Site ownership and responsibility is shared among actual users of the site.

These are basic lessons, perhaps. But they remain good things to remember for the next time around.

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A few years ago, I was in the office of a senior executive in charge of a large organization that faced a critical need to adapt to a changing market environment. He was expressing his frustration at his inability to get his staff to adopt the new ways of working he believed necessary for the organization to survive.

I tell them how important it is that we work more efficiently and become more customer focused. I model how I want them to interact with our customers. I demonstrate through special projects how I want them to work. But every time I think they get it, something happens that shows they don’t! he said. I can’t communicate any more than I already am!”

The first axiom of change management is to communicate. Communicate the need for change, communicate the result the change should affect, communicate the impact the change will have … communicate, communicate, communicate.

It seems unlikely that anyone who has been the target of change has complained about too much communication. However, it is also understandable that those instigating change can feel like they have exhausted every possible avenue without results.

We all know about the dangers of a high fat diet; the assault of messages around good nutrition is frequent and consistent. Leafy green recipes are as close as a mouse click away. Fast food restaurants are even starting to list the caloric breakdown of what they sell. However, none of this communication will realistically stop me from regularly consuming a Jack in the Box dinner.

Communication is critical to modifying behavior. It is hard to get people to do something unless they know you want them to do it. But you can’t communicate your way to fundamental and lasting organization change.

Justifying, explaining and encouraging change will only sway those that were probably going to do what you wanted them to do any way.

As difficult as it is to build and execute a comprehensive communication plan, it is nothing compared to the contentious and complex work of identifying and addressing the factors that keep an organization from changing. Chief among them:

• Power distribution: Change can upset the political status quo by simply redefining decision-making authority. Or, more subtly, by impacting perceptions of prestige, influence, or access to those that have both. As a change agent, do you have the political base and resolve to overcome opposition?

• Infrastructure: Existing processes and tools can restrict people’s ability to change the way they work and even how they solve problems and interact with each other.

• Organization culture: An organization’s values, history, and beliefs can subvert or support the direction you want to go. Stray too far from what is considered acceptable, and be prepared for overt and indirect resistance.

• Rewards and Punishments: Ultimately, what an organization values is demonstrated by the behavior it rewards and sanctions. Accountability is expressed both through recognition, promotion and raises, as well through what is ignored or not reinforced.

By methodically addressing the factors that keep people from changing, you will have conveyed more with a few strategic actions than a hundred emails, newsletter articles, or blog posts.

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The breakout session notes from the recent NWCCU Annual Meeting and Workshop became available on the NWCCU website on February 13. Below is a summary of the main themes and discussion points:

General Feedback on New Accreditation Model
• Holistic approach: Better than the old model and makes rational sense.
• Seven year cycle: Aligns better with many existing institutional strategic planning processes.
• Implementation timeframe: Too aggressive.
• Terminology: Confusing and unclear, specifically around the differences between themes and values.

Requirements and Evaluation
• Measures and data: How to associate measures with themes and mission. The recognition of the increasing importance of IR and of the challenge of translating data into better decisions.
• Evaluators: Concerns were raised about the training, skills, and number of evaluators and the associated impact on the fairness evaluation process.
• Non-compliance: What constitutes not meeting requirements?
• Tension between the prescriptive and the individualistic: There is a need to know specific requirements but an equal concern that spelling them out might limit the institutional freedom and uniqueness resulting from more general guidelines.

Information Sharing by New Model “Early Adopters”
• Documentation and experience sharing: Pilots and others preparing to follow the new model were asked to share their experiences as well as the documentation they produced. The NWCCU was also requested to share as much as the evaluation process as possible.

Communication and Participation Challenges and Approaches
• Participation: How to generate continued interest in process when not “emergency” – particularly with faculty. The new model driving a need for more strategic thinkers comfortable with process and measures.
• Communication: How and when to communicate the new model internally and externally.

Skill Development and Resources
• New skills: The emphasis on measures and process improvement may require staff and faculty training.
• Resources: Tools such as collaboration and data collection/analysis software may be needed. Additional staff or consulting help may be needed. Concern was raised about the cost of the site visits.

Alignment to Existing Practices and Impact of New Model
• Alignment: The extent to which an institution align existing strategic planning processes to a seven year accreditation cycle. The acceptability of choosing “easier” mission and themes so meeting accreditation standards is simplified.
• Reporting relationship: Uncertainty as to the degree of overlap between the NWCCU reporting requirements and other requirements such as those from legislature.
• Impact variability: The new model will impact institutions differently. Small colleges may struggle with data requirements and staffing pressure. Institutions without strategic planning processes may need to scramble.

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The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU) recently released a new accreditation model for member institutions. FiveSix Consulting views the model as a three phase lifecycle for institutional effectiveness:

Purpose and Potential. The institution defines its mission and key themes as well as the measures (or outcomes) that indicate success.  The desired goal state is then contrasted with the existing resource picture, potentially resulting in further refinement of the mission.  

Plans and Achievements. The institution engages in a regular planning cycle to integrate the core themes into everyday resource allocation decision making. All of an institution’s activities are linked to the mission and core themes and are evaluated for potential improvement.

Success and Viability. Effectiveness is achieved by fulfilling the mission and core themes. In order to ensure continued relevance in the future, the institution fosters a sound financial base and establishes systems to detect and adapt to changes in the environment. As conditions change, the institution reexamines its mission and the lifecycle begins again.

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Tamara and I spent the end of last week at the annual meeting of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, held in SeaTac, WA.

This organization is the regional accrediting body for institutions of higher education in the seven-state Northwest region of Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Washington. We decided to attend this meeting for several reasons:

• We had some exposure to the accreditation process while working with Seattle University implementing some data collection approaches for their self-study,  which is a very time-consuming and complex reporting and evaluation effort that is critical to the current accreditation process. We think we can help other institutions save time and effort by standardizing some of the approaches used, and we wanted to learn more about the whole environment to help build deeper understanding of potential areas of focus.
• The standards and oversight for accreditation are undergoing a significant overhaul. This will be disruptive and in a state of flux in terms of adoption over the next several years, so it seemed like a good time to get involved.
• We thought we might meet some interesting people and perhaps connect with a few future customers.

The context of the proposed changes is that there is increased pressure on the regional accreditation bodies (like NWCCU) to demonstrate that accreditation has actual impact on institutional improvement and accountability.

The upshot is that if the proposed changes are adopted, accreditation will change quite a bit. Today, it amounts to a two-year cram session that happens once every ten years. Starting in 2011, it will be more like writing a thesis over a seven-year period, ideally using tools that institutions already have in place.

The mantra of the day was that the new approach will use both analysis and synthesis. Participants will first break down the institution’s mission into goals, and measure how they’re doing by looking at traditional resource allocation and outcomes measures.

But the new take will then be to look at all functional activities though a single lens that aligns with core themes derived from the mission. This thematic review of all activities is where participants will need data and feedback, to be able to paint a picture of strengths and weaknesses that are aligned with big picture ideas from a strategic plan and an institutional mission.

This vision of using highly integrated processes of strategic planning, governance, budgeting, and evidence-based evaluation is going to be a tall order for institutions that don’t have the organizational maturity in place to work that way. Imagine trying to come up with broad institutional goals if you haven’t yet done a strategic plan. Or deciding on institutional priorities without clear governance roles.

If taken seriously, these accreditation standards could be catalysts for organizational development that brings diffused units into alignment around real strategic goals and improvement. Or, they could result in organizational chaos as everyone builds different ways to produce data that helps explain already existing processes. We’ll see.

Meeting attendees were largely positive that the new approach will help integrate continuous improvement into how decisions are made. But, one might expect that from the  typical president, vice-president for planning, or vice-provost for institutional effectiveness that one finds at such a meeting.  They may have a harder time explaining to their colleagues what this will mean going forward. (But we’re here to help!)

There will be more to come as we digest all we’ve learned, but some interesting questions caught my ear:

• How do we involve faculty in what is now an ongoing process of planning, budgeting, evaluation, and re-factoring? They’ll never want to participate!
• Program-focused reporting during accreditation self-study provided opportunities for some programs to get kudos for excellence. How can we preserve that when looking at institutional goals as a whole?
• Who should be on a steering committee now that we need people who can think broadly and synthesize data?
• Data management is now a lot harder because we have to track changes through the seven-year revision cycle. How will we manage all this documentation?

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