During the last two days, I have participated in two meetings during which we presented the results of a SharePoint project. The CIO and his team joined the first meeting. That's standard and not especially notable. The IT department is obviously involved in an enterprise rollout of any technology project. The second meeting expanded to include a V.P. from marketing, several Directors representing HR, Logistics, Manufacturing, Capital Projects, Quality, Purchasing, Corporate development and other departments (some of whom were marginally involved in the current phase). That's a mighty wide audience.
In my prior life, I primarily worked on ERP and CRM projects. They both have a fairly wide solution domain but not as wide as SharePoint. To be fully realized, SharePoint projects legitimately and necessarily reach into every nook and cranny of an organization. How many other enterprise solutions have that kind of reach? Not many.
SharePoint clearly represents an enormous opportunity for those of us fortunate enough to be in this space. It provides a great technical opportunity (which is somehow turned on its head here under "Technologies You Must Master"). But even better, SharePoint exposes us to an extensive and wide range of business processes through these engagements. How many CRM specialists work with the manufacturing side of the company? How many ERP consultants work with human resources on talent acquisition? SharePoint exceeds them both.
Like anything, it's not perfect, but it's a damned good place to be.
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(this entry cross posted between http://paulgalvin.spaces.live.com/blog/ and http://blogs.conchango.com)
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