Delivering Business Value within SharePoint

I was on a call this morning with my fellow MVP Jussi Mori (@jussimori) in a planning session for our joint presentation at the European SharePoint Conference next month in Vienna (How to Break the Zombification of the Enterprise), and as we talked about some of the key messaging we want to deliver, we kept circling back to the critical point of understanding what you are trying to accomplish with technology. Yes yes, let your eyes glaze over, because it sounds like nothing more than an empty platitude.

Achieving actual business value is difficult because it requires people to move beyond their spreadsheets and feature-based slideware and actually try to *understand* how to features and capabilities of our shiny new technology toys will actually deliver what our businesses need. It takes time, effort, and people to discuss, strategize, and implement a successful SharePoint deployment, whether online or on-prem. And what I share again and again through articles and presentations is that, in my experience, the only organizations who find success and can show measurable business value are the ones who can map features-to-business outcomes-to-value.

We track logins and uploaded files and storage limits, all of which are interesting – but they tell us absolutely nothing about the value being achieved. If you attended one of my three sessions at Ignite where I talked about some of the initial results of the #MeasureCollabSuccess initiative, you’ve heard this all before. For SharePoint practitioners, this is THE thing you need to focus on: know your desired business outcomes, understand how the technology maps to those outcomes, and put in place the measurements and governance to inform you of the progress of those outcomes.

As part of the European SharePoint Conference-Community Awards, Beezy has been selected as a finalist for two awards: Most Innovative Cloud Solution, and Best Intranet/Extranet Solution. Putting together the ebooks on each, I didn’t want to simply outline the technology used and apply a bunch of marketing data points. Instead, I wrote them with the goal of showcasing the achieved business value.

If you have not yet voted, we would love your support. Below you can find the link to vote in each category, as well as the PDFs that explain what we have done that we believe deserves these two awards – and your votes. Even if you’re not planning to attend ESPC, you can still vote.

• Most Innovative Cloud Solution (VOTE Here, or View PDF)
• Best Intranet/Extranet Solution (VOTE Here, or View PDF)

Whether looking for 3rd party solutions or building something yourself internally, you need to be asking tougher questions about the business value of what it is you plan to deliver. Companies are becoming more discriminant in their IT spending, and if your goal is to deliver any aspect of the modern digital workplace, you need to clearly understand the business value of what you build, plain and simple.

Looking forward to writing and talking more on this topic going forward.