Wednesday Re-Cap of SharePoint Conference 2011: It's a Journey, Not a Destination

Guest Blog Post by Rich Blank, Solutions Engineer with NewsGator

Wednesday at the 2011 SharePoint Conference my focus was 100% on customers. My numerous face-to-face customer discussions provided me with a great opportunity to listen and discuss their plans, concerns, challenges, and opportunities. Each customer is passionately focused on social computing in the enterprise; and yet, they are at different phases of their overall strategy and approach.   

One of our discussions was with a large materials science and process engineering organization with hundreds of R&D facilities around the globe. They want to leverage social technology to connect people, attract talent, and support innovation and research activities. Currently they are in the evaluation phase which is a typical first step in an organization's social journey. They are engaging their business users - helping them understand the capabilities of social technology in general. They also talked about how committed they are to SharePoint as a platform yet have been concerned about user adoption of the existing platform. Like many organizations they are doing their due diligence and looking at competitive offerings. They have tight budgets and resources and recognize that any decision will ultimately come down to total cost of ownership. I look forward to working with them as they begin their trial evaluation.

Another discussion was with a global company specializing in gases, chemicals, equipment, and services. Like the first customer I noted, they want to connect people and share product and engineering knowledge. This organization has already started on their social journey and is completing their trial evaluation - with immediate plans to move to a proof of concept as a next step. After a meeting with their CIO, it was clear they are already seeing the value of NewsGator on top of SharePoint. He told us a story about an employee in Asia who used Social Sites to engage in Q&A around a product and found an expert in the US who was able to answer his questions. The CIO told the project manager to skip the proof of concept and focus on a global launch of Social Sites! The conversation ended with a discussion about the importance of a phased agile deployment strategy, change management, and project planning.  

After these meetings, I was able to squeeze in some time to attend one conference session entitled “Creating Competitive Advantage using Social Media and Collective Intelligence” - given by Thomas Krofta of Avanade who happens to be a NewsGator customer. It was a great session and the focus tied right back to my earlier customer discussions. Krofta talked about the value of social media in the enterprise, the steps to implement social technology, and the importance of managing change. He used one of his customers as an example and walked through the phases of their social journey. Krofta then proceeded to demo Avanade’s social intranet – which uses NewsGator Social Sites for SharePoint 2010. He concluded with a summary slide that seemed to put everything in context with three keys for a successful introduction of social computing in the enterprise: (1) rollout approach, (2) change management, and (3) measurement. CMSWire has asked me to write a more detailed summary of this Avanade session - check it out. 

To conclude today's recap, I'd like to share a few relevant quotes from the Avanade presentation: 

“Social computing can’t be a standalone solution."

"Social computing is part of a company’s journey. It’s not the beginning and it’s not the end.”