Going to Johannesburg to Talk About the Cloud

I’m back on a plane this evening to begin my (very long) travels to Johannesburg, South Africa for my 2nd SHARE Conference (the first being Atlanta a couple years ago). While my conference duties are fairly lite (one session on day one, leading a table topic day two), my main goal is to be there in support of my good friends and Metalogix partners GTconsult, and I will spend the bulk of my time at their booth and meeting with our joint customers. Looking forward to once again spending some quality time with Brad, Warren, JJ and the rest of the team, and, as always, talking SharePoint and business strategies with attendees of SHARE.

For those of you unfamiliar with SHARE, unlike just about every other SharePoint event in the world, this one is for business users – focusing primarily on non-technical SharePoint topics. For those who follow my blog, you know I write extensively on business topics, although I occasionally take forays into administrative and business analyst topics. For next week’s event, I have prepared an updated version of a presentation given late last year at SharePoint Saturday DC (#SPSDC), and will focus on just a couple key customer scenarios that I hope will really resonate with the SHARE audience on the rise of the social organization, the shift toward cloud-based platforms and solutions, and the need to make governance a priority over both of these changes to the business climate.

My updated slides are now available on SlideShare:

There are a handful of slides here that I have been using in several of my recent presentations, because I think they provide very powerful imagery and certain SharePoint “truths” about the need to make governance a more central part of your strategy.

The underlying message that I try to convey is that organizations should not overly rely on the tools they purchase to provide the level of governance (i.e. security, reporting, administration, oversight) that their business requires. Most social and cloud platforms, compared to their on premises counterparts, are still very immature in management capabilities. As you move forward with your plans, be sure to do your due diligence, and ensure that the constraints of your system (legal, auditing, compliance requirements) are being met not just individually by each system – but across all systems. Think about the additional overhead required now to manage components that remain on prem, as well as in the cloud. Even when you’re talking about SharePoint (in a hybrid scenario, where some of your key workloads remain on prem in your intranet, while new workloads might be extended to the cloud via Office365 or Azure) not all management tasks are the same. Understand the differences, and build them into your governance plans.

Ok, need to go pack my bags. See you in Johannesburg!