One of the worst things about working in IT with the same company for a long time (over 26 years) is that you end up covering the same ground multiple times. Technology changes, vendors come and go and you gather useful experience. If you’re lucky, a 25 year career isn’t more properly defined as a collection of 25 1 year jobs. On the other hand, it’s sad when 25 years on the job are 22 years of history and 3 years of relevant experience.
However, my title isn’t sarcastic. It happens to be the case that lining up for a 2nd, 3rd or nth shot at a project gives you the chance to ask:
“What were we thinking?”
And, to craft a better approach for time n+1.
That’s how it is with a certain ECM project I’ve found myself involved with (again).
Unfortunately, I can’t share the details of the project, but I can share snippets of a presentation we recently gave to the manager of the underlying business area. Three of the bullet points under the heading “Project Goals” were:
- Improve the overall user experience
- Minimize duplication of effort in creation and maintenance within and across platforms
- Make it so the information adds value to (the underlying process)
Those goals haven’t always been our focus. Oh, they’ve always been a goal. They’ve always been important considerations, but our emphasis in the past has typically been content-centric. Let’s gather the content. Let’s organize the content. Let’s make the content easy to find. But, easy to find always presupposed that the person looking understood the technology well enough to look. That’s fine if you run a library and the patron has/had to understand the Card Catalog – most working-age adults were actually taught how that thing worked. If, on the other hand, you’re using SharePoint, assuming that your patrons will understand the technology is a bad idea.
Our sites typically had another assumption baked into the structure. We assumed that people would know what they were looking for. It might be easy to find what you need in that library if you want books on automotive maintenance. It might be less likely if the book you want is filed under “repairing an internal combustion engine” and it may be far less likely if it’s filed under “your friend the oxygen sensor.” To find the last one, you have to have already diagnosed your problem.
SharePoint is supposed to make that easy. If we did our job right, books on the oxygen sensor would be tagged with “automotive maintenance” in the first place. Of course, that should read “if we and everyone involved in the process did our jobs right” and that isn’t a safe assumption either. The reason my title isn’t sarcastic is because we aren’t building a new library. We aren’t building a new card catalog. We’re building a new entrance to the library itself. First and foremost, this entrance is designed to answer the question:
“What brings you to the library? What is it that you want to do?”
No assumptions. No prerequisite knowledge of document management techniques and SharePoint features required. This time, we’re taking the approach of being your guide.
The good news, well the even better news is that we’re mostly doing this with out-of-the-box features. If we continue in our automotive surrogate for the nuclear insurance topic, we’re splitting the things you can do across three main lines:
- You want to repair your car
- You want to know more about your car
- You’re the guy who writes the procedures, buys the books and sits behind the desk at the library and you want to do your job
In addition to that, we’re adding a template that will let us quickly build a page that you can call up when you get back to your garage that will guide you through the maintenance procedure you’re trying to perform.
It’s all still content and all of the tasks are content management tasks. It’s just that we’ve emphasized extracting the business value from that content over the proper way to store the content. We are managing to sneak that conversation in, by explaining what we have to do in order to make the other stuff possible. ECM is much easier to sell when you can demonstrate that it will add tangible value to a business process.