Craig Roth

“Driving Adoption” for SharePoint is a bad idea.  There, I’ve said it.  I’ve said it before too (see “’Driving adoption’ is a band aid for poor demand management”) using ITIL terminology. Now a new marketing book provides a term that may resonate better: Outside In strategy.

In an article at Knowledge@Wharton (“’Outside In’ Strategy for the C-suite: Put Your Customers Ahead of Your Capabilities”), George Day (one of the authors and a Marketing Professor at Wharton) describes the strategy:

Companies that have adopted an ‘outside in’ strategy are those with a focus on creating and keeping customers by delivering superior customer value. They do that by standing in the customer’s shoes and viewing everything the company does through the customer’s eyes. Think of customer value as the lens on the strategy.

‘Inside out’ thinking, on the other hand, begins by asking, ‘What are we good at? What are our capabilities and products? How can we use our resources more efficiently?’

When I read this, it struck me that what Professor Day is saying about marketing strategy is what I was saying about technology adoption strategy. As I put it in my blog entry: “If you took the time upfront to understand what the business needs and deliver it, you wouldn’t have to convince, cajole, or lure them to use your system.”  This came out of research I did on what “SharePoint as a Service” can mean and how to apply a service delivery methodology to SharePoint (I used ITIL). [Gartner ITP clients can see my full guidance model in “ITIL for SharePoint: Defining SharePoint as a Service Using ITIL Service Strategy”]

In my conversations with SharePoint implementers, I have found that most organizations driving adoption are treating SharePoint in the “inside out manner”.  They treat SharePoint as a finished product, which (paraphrasing Day) leads them to thinking what SharePoint is good at, what capabilities it has (content management, portal, personal pages), and figuring out how these could be leveraged more.  That’s not wrong per se.  It is well intentioned and can (indeed has) worked.  But I believe it is less likely to ingrain SharePoint in business processes than a service management approach (which I have also seen work). 

The “driving adoption” approach is evangelical (sometimes that is literally the name of the job role).  But those responsive to evangelism are not necessarily those that most need to be saved.  Isolated beacons of great SharePoint usage in organizations are often due to personality issues (like a hobbiest techie in the group or someone who came from another company that used SharePoint) that are unrelated to the amount of value it can provide.  Even probing the business for pain points may skim over areas of maximum value since those tend to reside in numb points that long ago spawned band-aid processes that would look silly to an outsider but everyone else is now used to them.

A service management approach (“outside in”) requires more work than providing cookies for lunch and learn sessions.  It requires spawning working teams throughout the business that catalog opportunities and a central catalog owner to detect patterns that justify creation of reusable services.  Sounds complicated, but, if done properly, the end result is a businessperson opening the catalog – just as one would open a Land’s End (or plug in your favorite here) catalog – to find attractive products that meet their needs, and then calling or emailing to say “I’d like one of those please”.  I admit, this is easier said than done – it is an aspiration, and not 100% of needs are repeatable enough to service-ize. This is an ongoing process that improves itself over time.  Just like the retailer, the service owner lives or dies by how good a job they can do at figuring out what the market wants quickly and providing it (and cutting resources from products that aren’t selling). 

If more SharePoint owners could think of themselves as outside-in service delivery organizations rather than inside-out evangelists, organizations would be getting much more benefit from their collaboration technology investments.

1 Comment »

Category: Collaboration Microsoft SharePoint     Tags: symposium

Share