The work with the Global Procurement Intranet at J&J has really picked up speed - after four months now at J&J I feel that I’m finally starting to build a more comprehensive picture of the organization I’m in, as well as the benefits and limitations of the SharePoint platform.
As we’ve been working on the logistics of getting a new Global Procurement SharePoint portal into production, a parallel track is an ongoing and slowly building effort to grow online communities for this matrixed and very decentralized community of procurement professionals. Identifying the value proposition to the end user is not an easy task: most are being asked to move out of a very familiar Documentum e-room environment and into SharePoint which, at first glance, can appear overwhelming. Some individuals seem to adapt and adopt more readily - I put these folks in what I call the “tinkerers” category; those who enjoy poking around and trying out new features. The tinkerers seemto have a higher tolerance for the endless futzing around with SharePoint web parts, features, and add-ons. Not to mention time spent trying to re-locate important functionality (“where was that…?”). Those who are not tinkerers are simply overwhelmed, or limit their activity to the document library, it seems.
On the collaboration front - I started out cheerfully counselling people to “identify collaborative opportunities around work activities,” only to realize that for most, this notion requires a good amount of guidance. The challenges are threefold: The adoptee has to be a tinkerer, with a “2.0,” collaborative mindset, willing to buck the conservative 1.0 culture at J&J. Building collaboration and community on this plaform, in this culture is requiring a persistent, steady encouragement through focused collaborative opportunities, as well as ongoing communication and evangelism about the platform to the myriad of smaller teams and groups throughout the community of about 1100 procurement professionals.
I’m also learning that one of the challenges of the platform is aggregating activity across the diverse collection of teamsite that are sprouting up. Especially for this matrixed organization, a sourcing manager may need to keep an eye on activity in multiple Procurement categories (represented in our case by individual Intranet hub pages and teamsites), although he or she may also be working in a team or group that has formed around an operating company or a group (Ethicon, or Pharma, as examples). For this reason, I’m liking SharePoint extension solutions that provide a window into end-user activity across the site collections - Newsgator is one solution we’re hoping to test this year.
From an IT perspective, I am increasingly positive about the promise of this platform to facilitate collaborative activity, integrate business data, and ultimately enable “real work” in the online space. However, I’m also more and more aware of the complexities of deploying a site that is modular (with reusable web parts), extensible (able to sustain a shifting information architecture) and user-friendly. At J&J the skills and understanding of the challenges of deploying on SharePoint are growing … slowly. And a traditional project-based IT model doesn’t help by creating a series of uniquely designed and architected solutions, with minimal sharing. Efforts are underway to address that, but I think will take some time to become fully fledged.
For the moment, however, there is a lot of excitement and buzz around our new Portal - as long as we can continue to build value, and show clear outcomes for the function, I should still be in a job this time next year!
