I would like to try a point counterpoint approach to the above statement. Before I move into this one, I’d like to define what a virus is for the purpose of this posting. I do not mean a mean spirited hunk of code that is designed to destroy anything and everything it touches. I mean more of a ubiquitous set of software capabilities that attaches itself to an organization and penetrates and replicates quickly with the goal of reproducing usage and the resulting revenue MSFT stream.
What does this mean to BPM?
SharePoint is a threat to BPM:
SharePoint pretends to be a BPM solution, but it falls short of what clients will need as they mature to a full business process improvement (BPI) life cycle. In addition, SharePoint contributes to generating many more stove pipe processes that have to be reined in later. It spreads so fast that processes pop up everywhere and sub-optimization flourishes.
SharePoint enables BPM
What better way is there to get organizations hooked on the benefits of process and efficient process management? SharePoint spreads the process behavior that can be channeled later. What better teaching device is there for people to see touch and experience? Besides almost all innovations start in a distributed manner and consolidate later. It’s natural.
It’s really a bit of both, really. Smart organizations plan for a migration path to more sophisticated process management experience that reaches beyond functional / task excellence, but leverages this fine entry point. Just like Visio was a terrific entry point to process modeling, SharePoint is a terrific entry point to process execution. .
3 responses so far ↓
1 Jeffrey Mann // Nov 12, 2008 at 7:46 am
This really is one one of the main issues I come across in talking customers about SharePoint: it can be so many things to different people. Depending on how you use it, SharePoint is a collaboration platform, a portal, a document repository, a search engine, an ECM platform, an intranet, an extranet, a web content management platform, a workflow tool, a development platform or a bottle opener (OK, not really that last one).
Initially, this is one of SP’s strengths, but it often ends up being a weakness. The answer seems to be SharePoint, no matter what the question is. The product’s widespread adoption means that more and more people will have to figure out where the limits and overlaps are.
2 Rashid Khan // Nov 12, 2008 at 5:57 pm
Does anyone remember the early days of Lotus Notes? Lotus coined the word “groupware” and was the pioneer in workflow. Lotus Notes went down the “viral” path of being the Swiss Army knife for doing everythig for everybody. Along the way it became large and cumbersome, the antithesis of agility. Today, no one talks about Lotus Notes as being a serious contender in the BPM space. OK, maybe Microsoft will execute much better than IBM. But at the end of the day, I believe that SharePoint will suffer the same fate as Lotus Notes for the same reason: BPM is too big to be rendered in to one facet of a Swiss Army Knife
3 Garth Knudson // Nov 13, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Jim, thank you for addressing this topic. From the vendor side, I find many organizations - government and commercial - investigating SharePoint’s workflow capabilities. To them SharePoint comes “free” with their enterprise license. Now they’re asking themselves how to get the most out of their free software in their really significant Microsoft investments. Since the majority are still new to BPM and don’t really know enough about workflow in general, they cannot easily and quickly differentiate between what SharePoint offers in contrast to a much more robust BPM product. They don’t understand that SharePoint is a technical tool meant for very technical people. It is not geared toward both business analysts and developers. Furthermore, they don’t see that using SharePoint workflow really requires a whole slew of other Mircrosoft products as well as signifcant investments in people, methodology and training. They don’t get that where SharePoint is the great democratizer of content, BPM is the great optimizer of forms and forms-based process automation. Where SharePoint is developer-centric, BPM is a business user friendly and proven in hundreds of ways to deliver content-enabled applications. Regarding SharePoint, Gartner has a lot of educating to do. BPM presents a better and more ROI-proven platform for deploying process-driven applications.
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