• Treating Governance as a one-time event
• IT leadership abdicating responsibility for Information Architecture and Roadmap
• Treating user adoption & training as an after thought
• Underestimating Human Resource implications
• Failing to educate and engage executives

Here are my notes from the webinar, presented here with gratitude to Dux!

SharePoint implementation continuum ranges from the draconian IT control to the wild wild west but you want to aim for governed empowerment.

Sin #1: Governance as a One Time Event:

SharePoint Governance is more than just a document:

• Importance of SharePoint governance plan in addition to general IT governance
• Balance of collaboration capabilities and their benefits vs. organizational requirements
• Ensuring the plan evolves with the business
• Who creates the plan? Who owns the plan? Who enforces the plan?
• Defined roles and responsibilities
• Making governance part of the training process
• Enforcenent vs. empowerement approach

Dux provided a Sample governance plan!

Sin #2: Leadership Not Involved in IA

• Inability to find information quickly and easily is one of the biggest frustrations.
• Involve business decision makers on information architecture design is critical
• Establishing a common language structure can greatly improve findability
• Having a defined taxonomy strategy and ongoing management of metadata management
• Understanding how to tag information correctly
• Will out-of-the-box provide sufficient search capabilities or is a custom solution necessary?

See IA Design Guidance from Microsoft for example.

Sin #3: Training & Adoption an Afterthought

It is common to see IT take a technology first approach and rollout SharePoint with little consideration for the user impact:

• Engage the business early on – identify and prioritize business solutions
• Always remember the WIIFM user mindset
• Relevant training approach (Process vs technology focused)
• Support mechanism

See training and adoption resources:

• How to Prioritize Business Needs Before Implementing SharePoint
• Successful SharePoint training strategies
• Want better adoption? Try SharePoint Olympics!

Sin #4: Underestimate Human Resources Requirements for SharePoint

• Management overlooks how broad SharePoint is and relies on existing personnel with little expertise to deliver platform and business solutions
• Various skillsets are needed — not just developer and / or admin
• Having a SharePoint business analyst is a key

Dux showed us a very handy spreadsheet for analyzing the scope of effort for each functionality of SharePoint implementation based on business priorities.

Sin #5:  Failed Exec Education & Engagement

Common theme among IT departments is that SharePoint doesn’t get enough executive attention and support. Executives want the benefits but fail to make the investments that are necessary.

Lack of understanding of how SharePoint can deliver business value is the cuprit:

• What are you trying to accomplish and why?
• What is the value? If it is quantifiable, then half the battle is won.

When executives understand the Report portion of the equation, it is much easier to get them to commit to the Investment side.

Dux clearly knows SharePoint!

As the group of 50 or so professionals were presenting themselves, I couldn’t help but notice how for so many organizations analytics falls in the same category as social media. Then again, as Dan mentioned in his presentation, on the Obama campaign anything that was not well understood went under the New Media umbrella

Titles aside, clearly the Obama’s campaign did many things right as demonstrated by Dan with a couple of data points:

• Facebook friends – 2.4 million for Obama vs 0.6 million of McCain
• YouTube video views – ~100 million for Obama vs ~20 million for McCain
• Unique website visitors – ~130 million for Obama vs ~30 million for McCain
• ~$500 million raised online

In his presentation, subtitled “Lessons from Obama to Haiti”, Dan Siroker who had been approached also by the Clinton Bush Fund for Haiti in helping them optimize their fund-raising campaign, shared five lessons:

1. Define Success

Define quantifiable success metrics, for example:

Website click thru rate = # of clicks / # of impressions

Email signup rate = # of signups / # of pageviews

Raised money per recipient = $ amount raised / # of recipients

2. Question Assumptions

This was one of the most fun parts of the presentations because Dan engaged the audience in a live multivariate testing. He showed us several variables — for the media and for the button on the splash page of the Obama campaign website, that were considered two nights before the Iowa primaries — and had us all vote for what we felt would be best. Very few of us guessed what the data had shown to work best — the “Learn More” button and a “Obama family photo”. And that was exactly the point — that by questioning all assumptions and relying on data, you can arrive at gradual improvements that lead to real results.

Selecting the “Learn More” button for the email signup over the previous “Join Us Now” button had increased signup rate by 18.6%.

Choosing the “Obama family photo” for the media choice on the splash page had carried additional 13.3% of improvement over.

The majority of the participants, myself included, had chosen a rousing, inspiring video from the Springfield conference but as Dan explained, the function of a splash page is to quickly skip it and get into the site, thus the media choice had to be something simple — a long video had its place but on the splash page.

The combination of these two optimization factors lead to a 40.6% combined improvement which lead to approximately 2.88 million additional email subscriptions, 288,000 additional volunteers and $57 million additional contributions. That is real money!

3. Divide & Conquer

This lesson was illustrated by another demonstration of a multivariate testing, this time indicating that audience matters — what might work for one audience, or time, or place, might not work for another audience.

4. Take Advantage of Circumstances

You can never predict life, so with all the data and powerful tools you might have at your disposal, you still need to have the flexibility to adjust course depending on what circumstances present themselves to you. A couple of well known examples illustrated well this point. Being present in the moment is important for all of us but probably even more valuable to a number person!

5. Start Today

Indeed, with tools like Google Website Optimizer and Optimizely (whose public beta I hope to join soon), there is no need to postpone starting to optimize your website! Shall we start? Let’s do it!

I got involved with this project after an old friend of mine, Alexandra Greeley, suggested my services to the chair woman of Slow Food DC, Kati Gimes. Before you know it, I was consulting with a group of young dedicated volunteers, many of whom have done wonderful work in website redesign or social media management for other DC-based non-profits, themselves.

During our meetings, we discussed the content strategy, the target audiences, the information architecture, and the technological platform. A young Photoshop aficionado took upon herself to design the banner incorporating the new Slow Food DC logo.

The site uses the new WordPress theme twentyone which is extremely powerful. It utilizes plug-ins for Google Analytics, Twitter and RSS feeds. It truly is a marvelous content management system which will burden of needing a webmaster any time a new content update is needed.

Congratulations, Slow Food DC! Cheers!

Today, Google purchased Metaweb, a company with a revolutionary idea which will get us a step closer to that original vision of a universal semantic web:

Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Programming (Pro-Developer)

Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer)

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Do you have any other recommendations?

If you find this, or other similar scenarios annoying, here is a valuable tool to opt out of behavioral advertising networks, link courtesy of Jim Stearne!

http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form

Spiritual-Education.net

The site features a beautiful Sakura theme of WordPress and quotes Baha’u'llah’s famous words:

“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” – Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 260