When I left Microsoft in 2009 and started talking to audiences about the problems and possibilities of SharePoint, I often talked about the platform's transition from renegade-outside-the-purview-of-corporate-IT to corporate-wide-collaboration-platform. That's one of the main reasons why SharePoint grew so quickly.
Ten years ago, the typical corporate environment was strictly controlled, and change happened at a snail's pace. Change requests took *forever* to get through IT, who were busy supporting desktops and telephony, and any servers or systems in place or being planned. Without collaboration support from IT teams, someone would install a free version of SharePoint on a box sitting underneath someone's desk. Setup was pretty straight-forward and simple, and SharePoint would inevitably catch on and spread across a team, between teams, and then throughout the corporate landscape.
The whole idea of collaboration sprawl reminds me of the 35 years I lived in Northern California, watching housing development spread in every direction, in most cases without a master plan in place – causing traffic gridlock and other infrastructure issues between cities.
As SharePoint grew and became the platform-of-choice for many of our business solutions, those same teams who went behind/around IT to install an unsupported technology then demanded IT to take a look at “this SharePoint thing” and to provide us with more flexible options for collaboration.
I saw this scenario play out even within Microsoft during my tenure. In fact, I've been on both sides of the issue -- having rolled out unsupported technology because I needed to get my job done, and IT was not supportive or was unable to move fast enough, but also as a manager in IT responsible for the change management surrounding our collaboration platform and other systems. This common scenario often plays out at the expense of structured collaboration and sound governance principles – security, compliance, and governance concerns that may come back to bite the organization later. But in the heat of the moment, when a front-line team is desperate to get work done, people push back against what they believe to be outdated concepts of process and top-down control, thinking to themselves, "We're growing fast, we need to be flexible and dynamic, and we need the latest technology to do our jobs. We don't need process or bureaucracy."
But why is it that "fast and flexible" is viewed as mutually exclusive of "stable and scale-able" when it comes to systems and repeatable processes?
Consider this example: An externally-facing corporate portal is open to customers, maintained by IT, with content owned by Marketing. Nothing inherently wrong with this scenario. But when several major customers contact a VP late Sunday night because a page that should be secure and internal-only is available through an unsecured public, who gets the call? Not the guys in Marketing. No, its the folks in IT Operations. Who is ultimately responsible for content and the portal? Marketing wants the ability to build sites and edit on the fly, and IT wants to ensure environments and features work before pushing them out in front of the customer.
End users and managers want the flexibility and autonomy to serve their customers without having to jump through hoops. Sometimes all it takes is a one day delay to lose a customer, so companies need to be responsive to win business, and to support their customers. The vast majority of IT organizations want nothing more than to deliver that flexibility and control to responsible end users – but they are also tasked with supporting the underlying infrastructure, whether they maintain that infrastructure on premises or manage one or more hosted services on their end user’s behalf.
Managing collaboration sprawl is as much about changing your company culture as it is about refining your processes. Mention the word “governance,” and people automatically assume that power is somehow being taken away from them. But there is shared ownership in a healthy governance strategy – and understanding that shared ownership is more of a cultural issue than a matter of documenting policies and procedures. The problem here is not control of the content management system or the overall quality assurance process, but healthy communication between IT and end users, and a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished – both from an end user perspective (fast provisioning, autonomy, service-level agreements with IT) and an IT perspective (defined policies and procedures, agreed upon response times, change management model).
Good collaboration is definitely a cultural skill. The organizations who are best at collaboration are often those with mature cultures that have clearly defined change management models that facilitate understanding and execution. The first step to every solution is always to sit down and discuss the requirements and come to a shared understanding -- before any solution is proposed. After all, until you have a clear picture of the problem space, how can you be sure you're solving the right problem?