The True Cost of SharePoint
In Shadow Work: The unpaid unseen jobs that fill your day, author Craig Lambert brings attention to the steady drumbeat of screen errands we run in our contemporary habitual problem-solving mode:
- Google the lab reports of a loved one
- Book our travel plans
- Assemble the fruits of online shopping delivered from ground shipping
The list – it goes on and all under the guise of saving us time and effort. That debatable conclusion evidences another widespread reality: the subtle distinction that the D-I-Y element leaves out “us” and “them” and of course “me.” The shadows are full of engineered shortcuts that not only short-circuit the middleman but pretty much every one else. The shadow workplace is more of the same – full of links to click on and devoid of human contact.
Self as a Service
The lesson applies to the implicit shadows that form around the virtual bearings of our employer-appointed laptops and that means SharePoint for more than 4-in-5 of us franchised knowledge workers. The D-I-Y arrangements facilitated by Microsoft can be at best a highly improvised dance towards a gold partner in waiting. The bitter pill here is that most business teams looking to circumvent their IT organizations can’t mediate their own SharePoint-crafted business solutions.
It’s not a question of a next, better version. It’s the void of human intervention inside their shops to steer them straight on best deployment practices. In Microsoft parlance this means leveraging or reusing the promises inherent in true out-of-the-box configuration by what the dedicated support engineer refers to as “citizen developers” in the slide ware version of that alluring scenario.
It’s an environment where A = actions (workflows) meets B = outcomes (calendars) through the story of how we get from A to B (C = documents). The collaborations they nurture result in the authoritative content that speaks to the knowledge transfer and training cycles of an integrated and responsive enterprise. That’s the slide ware talking.
Citizen Users
The realities on the ground paint a less inspired picture. A governance-free SharePoint farm is a breeding ground for sprawling folder structures, abandoned sites, and a random document-generating set of search results. Mouse-over them and witness the double whammies of sketchy metadata and inconsistent access policies!
Are these encroaching shadows the byproduct of an organization expecting their employees to D-I-Y their way through a tangle of features and the operational supports needed to maintain them? Surely, it’s not all on Microsoft when the SharePoint PMO or core deployment team treats governance as an option or an afterthought, or worse, cedes control to a third party that will flee town long before the rules of the road map are based on actual business goals or user experiences.
So no, most of these projects that run off the platform rails are not growing pains or Microsoft over-promising the merits of its enterprise strategy but this: the untenable notion that users assume the burden of realizing the benefits for themselves and their teams.
Shadows over the Cloud
That said, it’s fascinating to speculate whether Microsoft sees these widespread frustrations as a stain on its brand or money in the bank. That’s the final tipping point for battle-fatigued customers to relinquish the care of the enterprise to the cloud.
And is it that far-flung a scenario to suggest tomorrow’s Microsoft customers will be performing their own shadow work via Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. to engage the support they deserve?