How to enable the business to do more by getting IT to do less...and then more?!

IT departments
around the world are under pressure to balance the need to provide their
businesses with additional productivity while becoming more efficient and
complying with a regulatory environment that's more demanding than ever. The
need to become more and more transparent and collaborative with partners,
customers and constituents also has leaders of IT organizations looking for
solutions that will enable them to address these requirements without
over-stretching their It staff. Au contraire, those decision makers are
actually looking to relieve IT teams from the basic activities that users could
do themselves if they had the right tools and the right environment to do that.
That would enable IT to free resources to focus on priorities that are of a
higher order from the business' perspective.

During a recent
trip to meet customers in the U.S., I was able to have very candid
conversations with CIOs and CTOs about their ever-tightening budgets and the
need to drive adoption of their SharePoint environments and create more value
from current and future investment in SharePoint. Those of them that are
already using earlier versions of SharePoint, are going through a process through
which business users become more and more accustomed to the SharePoint
environment after an initial training led by IT. In cases where The IT team is
doing that effectively, they usually find a business team that is an effective
adopter of technology, ramps the people on the team on SharePoint, and then
follows that team closely and makes sure to let everyone in the company or
division know about any success stories with adoption and enhanced productivity
in that specific team. With leaders of business units looking to become more
effective themselves, hearing about another team's success makes it more
tangible a goal to pursue. Building on that momentum is IT's path to
accelerating adoption and to making their bet on SharePoint have an even higher
return on investment (ROI), with shorter break-even periods.

Some of the
customers I spoke to are trying to imitate a "blueprint" from a small IT team
of a local government organization that was able to get their business user to
a point in which they are independent from central IT for all of their daily
activities. By investing in the right level of training and then using site
templates and reusable web pages, one person is supporting those business users
and enabling the limited It resources there to be allocated to do other things.
By creating excitement around early success stories and sharing the benefits to
the business user from their perspective, the IT team was able to get more
people on board more quickly and get to a point in which demand for SharePoint
training was coming from users rather than being pushed by IT.

In another
organization, in the transportation space, the central IT team was able to
re-allocate a team member from supporting business users to focusing on driving
an SAP implementation and then connecting it to their SharePoint platform.
That, for me, was yet another proof that focusing on a single platform, and
providing the business with solutions that have a common user interface,
enables IT to relieve some of the burden of supporting daily operations and
making it possible to do more with the same resources.

With the
capabilities that are included in SharePoint 2010, it is simpler for IT to
drive adoption. The new SharePoint ribbon user interface makes the SharePoint
environment even more familiar and intuitive to business users, especially
those that are using either Office 2007 or Office 2010. Editing SharePoint
sites with the new wiki-based Web Edit capability requires less training to get
business users up and running and is an immediate win for IT teams as far as
proving the ease-of-use of the SharePoint 2010 platform. Then, features such as
the Office Backstage, Expertise Search and others push people to do more in an
independent manner and further-support the notion that many daily activities of
business users can be done without having IT involved.

During the launch
event for SharePoint 2010 and Office 2010 on May 12th, early
adopters of SharePoint 2010 will be sharing their stories and many of them are
about this strategy of empowering business users to do more while enabling IT
to do.... Well, more as well!

In order to learn
more about how to go about it, you could:

-         
Visit the virtual launch event,
starting May 12th, at: www.the2010event.com

-         
Visit the new SharePoint 2010
web-site that goes live on May 12th, at: www.microsoft.com/sharepoint

-         
Read the SharePoint 2010
product evaluation guide (here, starting May 12th)

All the best,

Gideon