green [green] –adjective
1. Not fully developed or perfected in growth or condition.
I’ve been waiting for a while now to invite the J&J Global Procurement community members to check out the new MySite capabilities and features. MySite – a personalized employee information page, offers J&J employees a place to identify skills, responsibilities, colleagues, documents and more in one personalized view. It also attempts to aggregate activity across the SharePoitn platform - surfacing sites and documents that you’ve got in other SharePoint sites.
MySite is a huge leap from the existing “Wave 1” employee directory solution at the company – for most J&J employees, simply having an employee directory that allows you to find people and see their smiling faces in an actual photo is enough of a reason to jump on board right away. But, like many things SharePoint, out of the box MySite does little to really enable community and connection in a user-friendly fashion.
MySite does have some features that could jump start expertise location and community at J&J – but figuring out how to make it useful is apparently not part of the remit of the team that plugged it in. So understanding how to tweak settings that show colleagues, changes, documents, sites, etc. is a process undertaken in a largely ad-hoc way across the company - in dribs and drabs.
The result - individual business units and organizations all around J&J are, or will be, spending time writing up “getting started on MySite” documentation to guide their communities to adopt this new platform. Some are simply doing what they can as they can figure it out. For
most, they may take a look, but will ultimately walk away.
I’m digressing a bit - MySite OOB is missing the easy view to collective activity that the rest of the world is starting to nearly take for granted on places like FaceBook, MySpace, and through microbloggin. And the foundational work needed to identify your community is just too hard: At J&J, for instance, the use of public Distribution Lists that really represent an organization, team, or function is chaotic, so most everyone uses local DLs in an Outlook group. It turns out to be mysteriously difficult to turn such a group into a list of names on the start. It seems logical to me that most people’s locally managed DL’s are the seedlings for their community - right? If you could upload and go with your pre-existing teammates - presto! Your adoption is halfway through. Cutting and pasting, or manually sorting through the detritus-filled list of names MySite helpfully exposes from your Outlook Address Book is just not that great.
What’s the best way to manage this? Well, there are ways to work it out and make it easier - but here’s where the “applied collaboration” skill set is missing at the company. There are some (very few) folks who think high level thoughts about collaboration, and there are lots of IT folks who plug in these pieces of SharePoint - but betwixt and between there is a massive gap - what’s needed are true e20 practitioners, who understand the convergence of the business, culture and technology, and have the skills to be able to convey the fine tuning needed for these e20 tools to deliver a user experience that not only resonates, but delivers value and context.
