In the current economic climate, it is important to consider if companies are actually getting the most out of their IT environments. In a topic close to my heart, I have seen portals and intranets, often based on Microsoft technologies, that while they may have met their initial goals, are many times left unloved and little is done to really exploit the platforms that they are built on. Companies still seem to prefer to spend huge effort re-creating documents that already exist somewhere or spend hours creating fancy forms in Excel with little thought about how to distribute and collate them. Far too often email is pressed in to service to fill gaps simply because its there! I often wonder if the designers behind Excel could have foreseen all the strange uses that it has been put to over the years and not always in a good way!
All this ad-hoc made on the fly solutions perhaps were driven from necessity, or ignorance – maybe central IT was too busy or considered this sort of work too small to be of interest. Often departments will resort to hiring their own contractors to build little forms based systems in Word and Excel independent of what is going on elsewhere in their company. Microsoft Access databases spring up doing all manner of things and holding key data that could be important to others if only they knew it was there.
All this may have been fine in boom times when they could afford to hire and to duplicate solutions and indeed create little inefficient IT pockets around the enterprise, but now it’s not so easy to justify.
No manufacturer would allow their tools to be misused and under exploited in this way, but somehow because its software and invisible people get away with it.
So what can be done? Increasingly companies have deployed tools such as SharePoint, - maybe as a basis of their Intranet, or as a collaborative tool for projects. However, they don’t all do a good job of driving adoption and thinking about other uses for it. Although often it too can be abused and used in an inefficient way - usually due to a lack of guidance and training.
Microsoft has also been thinking about this and has come up with an approach to teasing out more real business value from such tools as SharePoint and Office. The initiative is called the “Business Value Planning Services” (BVPS) program.
The idea is that through a series of workshops and interview with the business centred on a set of business pain points that a plan and business case can be drawn up. The outputs consider the “As-Is” situation, the “To-Be” situation and the steps to get there and how to drive adoption. It is basically a catalyst to get people in a company talking about better ways of doing things and properly using the tools that they have available.
So why use a rake to sweep the floor when there is a vacuum cleaner in the cupboard!