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...linking the knowledge of people
Welcome to AKG's Collaboration & SharePoint Blog
I’d like to welcome you to AKG's Collaboration & SharePoint blog, where we’ll focus on the interplay between collaboration, knowledge management, SharePoint, and how users adopt the new practices these three factors offer. We’ll explore these issues as this blog evolves. We’ll challenge assumptions, invite shared learning, and work to deepen our understanding of what is happening all around us.
One of our greatest challenges as a company is to overcome categories and labels that have been out there for a very long time, and to offer explanations that are clear enough to benefit our clients. When client contract-types see “SharePoint” in our proposal, we get slotted into the “technical” bucket. When they see “training and user adoption” we are categorized as “management consultants”. The truth is that the latest generation of collaboration products like SharePoint have blurred the lines between these disciplines. More to the point, products like SharePoint work well when you have an approach that integrates the people, process, technical and learning issues. Yes, you’ve heard this before. The difference is that a good SharePoint deployment moves much, much faster than a traditional tech rollout. Moreover, if you have the kind of success we’ve had at the FAA - where we have 32,000 users – there will be things happening at the edge of the SharePoint system that you won’t know about. In one case we stumbled on a group that was using their SharePoint capability to collaborate on the design of aircraft control towers. This reality assaults many of the long-held approaches we’ve used in the consulting or systems-integration community. In the introduction to this blog, we talked about how the lines between knowledge management, SharePoint, and collaboration are blurring. That’s just the beginning! We were called yesterday into a major opportunity that had been billed as a “knowledge management” engagement. It turned out to be collaboration, SharePoint, document management, workflow, and information sharing. So here’s the question. How is the consulting community coping with this fusion of concepts? Are our practices evolving? Does our language reflect the change?
One of our greatest challenges as a company is to overcome categories and labels that have been out there for a very long time, and to offer explanations that are clear enough to benefit our clients. When client contract-types see “SharePoint” in our proposal, we get slotted into the “technical” bucket. When they see “training and user adoption” we are categorized as “management consultants”. The truth is that the latest generation of collaboration products like SharePoint have blurred the lines between these disciplines. More to the point, products like SharePoint work well when you have an approach that integrates the people, process, technical and learning issues. Yes, you’ve heard this before. The difference is that a good SharePoint deployment moves much, much faster than a traditional tech rollout. Moreover, if you have the kind of success we’ve had at the FAA - where we have 32,000 users – there will be things happening at the edge of the SharePoint system that you won’t know about. In one case we stumbled on a group that was using their SharePoint capability to collaborate on the design of aircraft control towers. This reality assaults many of the long-held approaches we’ve used in the consulting or systems-integration community. In the introduction to this blog, we talked about how the lines between knowledge management, SharePoint, and collaboration are blurring. That’s just the beginning! We were called yesterday into a major opportunity that had been billed as a “knowledge management” engagement. It turned out to be collaboration, SharePoint, document management, workflow, and information sharing. So here’s the question. How is the consulting community coping with this fusion of concepts? Are our practices evolving? Does our language reflect the change?