We just published a new Industry Watch Report titled, “The SharePoint Puzzle – Adding the missing pieces.” The study, based on the responses from 551 organizations, identified a lack of expertise, lack of strategic plans, and resistance from users as the top three most prevalent business issues associated with SharePoint. But despite these concerns, most organizations are planning to increase or maintain the level of SharePoint spend on internal development, integration to other repositories, training, add-ons, hardware, services and licenses over the next 12 months.
The research investigates why organizations selected SharePoint and how it has performed against expectations; identifies gaps in enterprise content management (ECM), collaboration and business process management (BPM); and explores how organizations are adding missing pieces with SharePoint add-ons, third-party extensions, and cloud services.
For most organizations, SharePoint is considered a technology responsibility. The study found that 68 percent of SharePoint implementation decisions are made by the CIO or IT manager despite the fact that a single system is more often deployed across the enterprise, establishing SharePoint as a highly-integrated business system when compared to most enterprise systems.
CEOs who view SharePoint as a technology tool rather than a business platform should reconsider. The research points to the need for a company strategy and executive vision in order to get the most business benefit from a SharePoint implementation. A successful SharePoint implementation calls for executives to engage with IT to drive effective collaboration across business units that maps to the organizational culture.
The top reasons given for SharePoint selection include internal collaboration, file share replacement, and the creation of an intranet or portal. Unfortunately, SharePoint is still considered to be difficult to use. Organizations pointed to ease of content migration and information governance as two desired capabilities still lacking in SharePoint. Specific issues with metadata and taxonomies were cited by 41 percent. In these cases, investment in user training could likely help resolve issues.
Certain aspects of SharePoint functionality, including internal collaboration and document management, for the most part, meet more than half of respondents’ expectations, yet a third of users complain about records management, email management, and social tools. The findings point to the need for IT, end-users, and management to be involved in the planning of a deployment, since without users’ contributions early on, success can be quickly derailed once the system is up and running.
The research indicates SharePoint will continue to dominate the market due to a growing appreciation for the software as a platform, and additional third-party add-ons will enhance capabilities to meet specific business needs. For the business success of SharePoint, however, there needs to be a careful orchestration of corporate strategy, end-user ownership, IT implementation, and third-party enhancement.