buckleyPLANET

Deconstructing Cloud-First

Within various governance presentations for SharePoint audiences, I have been including my own slides and those from various Microsoft leadership outlining some of the changes coming about due to Microsoft’s “Cloud First” strategy. As I describe it to people, this is the biggest change to the way Microsoft does business since moving from DOS into Windows, altering what they develop, and how they develop products and services. There’s been a lot of talk about the “One Microsoft” initiative and how teams are being moved, consolidated, and restructured – but Microsoft has always been heavy-handed on the reorgs, and honestly, I don’t view these more recent announcements as a snapshot in time, but a view into the new world of work inside of the company.

In his Redmond Magazine article entitled Why the Microsoft ‘cloud First’ Model Changes Everything, Don Jones (@concentrateddon), principal technologist at Concentrated Technology, outlines some of the significant changes underway, and shares his perspective on how this impacts the partner channel. I’ve added some of my own thoughts on each, but his article is still worth a read:

• Building for the cloud first, and then bundling those features for on prem releases
  We’ve been hearing Microsoft people talk about this for quite some time, but what has confused most is the on prem roadmap. Building for the cloud does not mean, necessarily, that on prem goes away. The SharePoint product team, for example, recently reassured the community that there will be future on prem releases as long as customers wants to purchase server products. While Microsoft’s primary focus will be in delivering the best experience for cloud customers, the code base for cloud is the same as for on prem, and those features which can be used in an offline architecture will be bundled at regular intervals (cumulative updates, service packs, major releases) similar to what we’ve seen in the past. 
  
• Evergreen updates, with more frequent releases, smaller changes
  For those interested in the cloud, this means very frequent feature releases. Yammer has been know to release changes a couple times a week, and utilizes telemetry to identify which features people are using (and not using) and to focus development efforts on the areas of the platform that will have the largest impact. The Yammer model may not fit every product or team, but every organization across the company is moving in this direction.
  
• Focusing more on SMB, chasing the long-tail
  Ask most SharePoint leadership if they are focusing on small to medium businesses, and they will tell you no……but as Jones points out, most current cloud services fit the SMB model, and the limitations of customizing and integrating with them will keep many enterprises from moving entirely into the cloud – though most are looking at ways to reduce CAPEX expenditures by moving some workloads out of locally-managed servers. But feature limitations are just a near-term problem for enterprises, as the platform will mature and Microsoft will, over time, figure out a way to provide parity with the on prem experience for these requirements-heavy customers. There’s also the need for Microsoft to continue to grow its business, to develop new customers, and to provide a return on investment for its investors. The SMB market is largely untapped (15% penetration, per Gartner earlier this year) and is the primary growth opportunity for Microsoft’s collaboration and productivity solutions, allowing it to maintain its strong Office, Exchange, and SharePoint growth numbers. 
  
• Manageability of their products and services
  Having spent some time in MMS/BPOS (pre-cursor to Office365), I know something of the management overheard of these systems. Another aspect of developing for the cloud first is that it helps reduce the operational costs of Microsoft’s own internal systems, as well as the overhead of managing its cloud services. It is a fact that Microsoft looks at its own administrative pains, and prioritizes some of their product strategies around easing these pains – for their customers, and for themselves. Microsoft “dogfoods” their software, and so they know first-hand what it takes to manage their software at an enterprise level, and are constantly looking at ways they can improve.

One thing that Jones doesn’t mention, but that I talk about in my sessions, is that Microsoft is being fairly candid about the fact that they simply do not yet know all of the impacts of these changes, or how it may affect partners and customers in the short-term. In a discussion this past summer with Microsoft COO Kevin Turner, he shared that the company is erring on the side of “moving fast" rather than clear communication of future roadmap. It was refreshing to hear a senior Microsoft leader talk about the many unknowns of their path forward, but that they know what they are doing is directionally-correct.

Two things you can expect from Microsoft in the future: change, and forward movement.

You Could Say That I Am Pro-Business Analyst

The Business Analyst is a largely misunderstood role. Years back, I worked closely with BAs in my role as a Technical Project Manager within a BI shared services team. These folks were very senior, and were very much the “go to” people within the organization who understood both the end user and business requirements (though they were not the customer) and the technical specifications (though they were not the architects or engineers) and provided the much-needed translation between the two. In my experience, the BA is one of the most critical functions in an organization.

While working as a consultant a few years back, I ran into several companies that treated the BA function as more of a step-child of the PM role, and saw many BA's being hired as, essentially, junior PMs, always aspiring to the full-fledged PM role. This should not be the case -- the BA and PM are two very different roles. I remember working with Cisco back in 2002 and being amazed at how much their BAs, who were all very senior people within the organization, were involved in every aspect of the platform implementation. These were the people who understood the impacts of every tool decision, every information architecture nuance, and helped the room full of technology experts, consultants, and vendors to understand how our efforts impacted the company. I learned a lot from that project, and compare most of my experiences with PMs and BAs to that brief period in my professional life, a good portion of which has been spent managing PM and BA teams, spinning up project management organizations (PMOs), and working with BAs in operations and management capacities.

In presentations on migration and planning best practices for SharePoint, I often remark that every new SharePoint project begins as a Business Analyst activity. In fact, at this past weekend’s SharePoint Saturday event in Washington DC, I spent about an hour filling someone’s ear (I’m so sorry) with my thought on the BA versus PM role. I can get carried away, I know.

So what is the role of the Business Analyst, and how does it fit into a successful SharePoint strategy? While there are different kinds of Business Analysts (Requirements Analyst, Business Process Analyst, Organizational Analyst, IT Business Analyst, Systems Analyst, Reporting Analyst, etc) the core functions of this role remain fairly consistent, in my experience:

1. Understand what the business does, how it operates
2. Examine existing business processes
3. Identify gaps in processes, opportunities for improvements and automation
4. Capture requirements, create mockups
5. Generate technical requirements, proof of concept solutions
6. Help implement the new processes, features and tools
7. Document improvements, measure, repeat the process

You may have some slight adjustments to this view of the role, but hopefully there aren’t any surprises. Now apply this understanding to how you prepare for your own SharePoint deployments – or in any other IT-led initiatives for your business. Experience has shown that few organizations properly staff their administration team, much less provide the SharePoint team with a dedicated -- or even a part-time -- Business Analyst resource. SharePoint is, generally speaking, grossly understaffed.

With automation and a powerful feature set, you can do much more with fewer people in SharePoint. However,proper staffing is critical to successful deployment and ongoing maintenance of SharePoint. Your BA function may be filled by the same person/people that administer the platform, but it is important to understand -- and drive accountability -- for these activities. I would venture that a lack of understanding of key business processes, and the gaps between what SharePoint provides out-of-the-box and what it is capable of doing is at the heart of most end user adoption issues.

If you haven't properly defined the problem, you're not going to build the right solution, plain and simple. And that's why the Business Analyst function is so critical to SharePoint. In life, we rarely take the time to slow down and think about the consequences of the actions we take – but when we slow things down a bit, and take the time to process some of the decision we’re making, you’ll find that the quality of the decisions you make improves. That, in a nutshell, is what a BA can do for your team. Their job is to think things through, and to put things into perspective.

We need more BAs.

[Image on How to High-Five from Wired.com]

Balancing Governance and Social

Back in 1997, between working full-time, attending business school in the evening, and trying to get my own software startup off the ground, I began working with a developer on building out an integrated instant messaging (IM) client for my startup's collaboration platform. I had been an early adopter of IM, with a college roommate joining America Online in its heady days, and bringing me in on some AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) beta testing. In my work life, IM quickly replaced the need for an entire "tier" of my email messaging practices, providing an improved synchronous communication experience when working with my team, my classmates, and my friends.

If you dig through my blog content you'll find a June 2004 post referring to an "open letter" format whitepaper directed toward Microsoft (Capitalizing on Collaboration: Microsoft's Collaboration Strategy), with suggestions on where to take SharePoint (the link to the downloadable PDF is long gone, but the post includes the full text). Within that post, I mention the need to include stronger project management capability and MS Project integration (more on that in a future post), but also to encourage Microsoft to stake out a leadership position in the social collaboration space and embrace these technologies as a differentiator, but also because I recognized even back then the value of these capabilities to organizational collaboration. I was using social tools across my personal, professional, and academic collaborations, and was finding tremendous value.

Some people claim that it took Microsoft another 8 years or so to finally figure out social. I don't agree entirely with that position. At the European SharePoint Conference, which took place in Berlin in October 2011, I gave a popular session called "SharePoint's Social Media Scorecard" where I discussed the various social-minded features in SharePoint 2007 and 2010, as well as the features within some of the leading consumer-based platforms and other competing platforms, including Box, Jive, IBM Connections, Ning, and a handful of others, scoring them for feature-richness and with how well the platforms and features integrated into common workloads. Looking back over the past 2 years since that event, its amazing to see how much the technology has changed -- and Microsoft's strategy around social has evolved, putting itself into the leadership quadrant (if I can borrow Gartner's terminology). The reality is that the transition began back in the WSS days.

But in a world that is moving so rapidly toward a 'social enterprise' paradigm, one issue that remains is the general lack of governance within and across SharePoint, Office 365, and Yammer. I know -- I harp on this topic a lot, and many people are asking whether this is even a real issue. But a lack of governance remains as the number one constraint for CIOs who are reluctant in their adoption of social collaboration. Their end users are pushing these businesses toward social, with most organizations recognizing and documenting the performance and financial benefits derived from improved communication and higher engagement levels through social. And if your end users are on the platform, engaged and innovating, you're going to earn back those financial investments much more quickly.

Going back to 1997, there were reasons why my company wanted/needed control over the content and metadata assets within our portals, but control without flexibility to collaborate freely and innovate was killing that model. I saw it back then, but governance constraints trumped everything. But the most technically locked-down and secure portal in the world, if it is without end users, is a failure. The more constraints you put on a system, the less likely people are to use that system. One of the goals of any startup at the time was to tap into the social behaviors of teams, but in a managed (governed) way that provided flexibility and security. We may not have fulfilled our vision then (we sold the company after 3.5 years), but those ideas have been central to my thinking on the balance between governance and social.

I'm looking forward to talking more about this subject at #ESPC14 in Barcelona next year, but until then you can check out my webinar on the topic on the ESPC site under community resources. And, as always, feel free to reach out to me at cbuck@metalogix.com or on Twitter at @buckleyplanet

Content Wrap-Up for November

I have this ongoing conversation with my good friend and IAMCP Seattle co-founder Jeff Shuey (@jshuey) about the volume of content I write each month, and about how I just don’t feel productive with fewer than 20 to 25 articles published each month. An exception to the rule is when you combine a full week of MVP Summit with two SharePoint Saturday events (both of which I keynoted), AND the halt of all work for Thanksgiving and family activities. It was a good month, but it just blew by, and the result was a dry month for content.

However, I did manage to get a few things out the door, a couple of which have started some serious threads within a couple of the Yammer communities in which I participate. Of course, I also did some self-promotion:

• Inside The SharePoint Actors Studio (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1eNBnga

One of my main November themes was around the month’s tweetjam, focused on SharePoint optimization, and, specifically, replication. We had an excellent turnout for the tweetjam, summarized below, but I was also able to interview Metalogix Product Manager Mark McGovern (@docpointmark, another former Axceler compatriot) who now does product management for our Replicator product:

• November TweetJam: Optimizing SharePoint Performance (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1k8Mv8i
• Optimizing SharePoint for Geographically-Dispersed Teams (Storify) http://bit.ly/18cHCZO
• Product Insights: An Interview with Mark McGovern on Replicator (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/188Tm1B

I’ve always included migration in my regular rotation, but with our product roadmap producing some great new features, and with integration of the Axceler and Idera assets into the Metalogix product suite, I’ll be writing a lot more on the subject – hopefully pairing up with Steve Marsh and Tamir Orbach on a few things:

• SharePoint Transformation Through Migration (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/1hx5RqP

I took a break from some of my social topics this past month – not because I didn’t have things to talk about, but with my event activities and vacation, it just didn’t rank as high on my priorities

• Connecting Content to Social (AIIM) http://bit.ly/IG0ZAR

I just completed 2 years as president of the Seattle chapter of the International Association of Microsoft Channel Partners (IAMCP), and am leading planning activities for 2014 later this month, so the themes of community and the Microsoft Partner Network have been on my mind:

• Making Community A Strategic Activity (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/18kW7aY
• Building A Brand (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1gDbr8e

As always, governance continues to be a major theme in my content. Earlier this year, I recorded a webinar on the topic of social and governance for the European SharePoint Community, and finally provided their site with a summary article on the topic – and am now working on a couple follow-up articles for ESPC and TechRepublic. I also did a live webinar based on my 2012 governance survey results, which can be found in the Metalogix archives:

• Controlling Sprawl Means Process+Culture (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/IrjNUu
• Developing Your Governance Strategy for Social (EurpeanSPC) http://bit.ly/1g7IDah
• SharePoint Governance Benchmark: Where Do You Stand? (SlideShare) http://slidesha.re/1ixGyGv

And finally, a major issue being discussed in partner and MVP circles is the confusion around Microsoft’s messaging of SharePoint’s on prem roadmap (how we’ve historically installed and used SharePoint locally) versus the cloud roadmap (via Office365). Look for much more content on this subject, as I hope to help clear up some of the confusion:

• Finding The Right Flavor Of SharePoint (buckleyPLANET) http://bit.ly/1cUqDv2
• Managing the Evolving Models of Collaboration (Metalogix blog) http://bit.ly/18kWq5r

l’m back on the road this week, currently sitting in a hotel in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida to participate in another session of the AIIM.org Executive Leadership Council (ELC). I have a few articles in the pipeline, and will be participating in SharePoint Saturday DC this weekend. If you’re in the neighborhood, stop by and say hello!

In Defense Of On Prem

Back in April, I wrote a blog post where I shared my perspective on what is happening with the roadmaps and positioning of SharePoint, Office365 and Yammer, and Microsoft’s overall messaging for the platforms. My underlying message was that change is happening, most of it directionally correct, that there have been some failures on the messaging front – but that Microsoft would quickly adapt and change to the problems being identified by customers and partners, which would do even more to accelerate this change toward the cloud. One of the statements I made, and for which I took some heat, was that Microsoft “underestimated the demand for on premises and hybrid deployments.”

I stand by that statement… but understand my perspective:

• I had been working for a content infrastructure software company (which was acquired by my current company, Metalogix, which is the biggest content infrastructure ISV) which has a global reach, and I have a view into some of the largest SharePoint deployments in the world, with some understanding of what they are trying to achieve with their SharePoint platforms.
• My experience with collaboration, social, and knowledge management platforms stretches back into the mid-nineties, back to when I helped build and deploy several large corporate portals, and I am keenly aware of the deep line of business (LOB) application and other work stream integrations that happen within these environments.
• Add to this my experiences with both large (Pacific Bell, Hewlett-Packard) and small organizations (several startups), and the common issue across them of sometimes having to wait on new technologies, pushing instead to get the most out of an older technology until the cost of not moving exceeded the cost/time/pain of moving.
• And then there is my role as an Evangelist – part of which is to constantly watch what is coming up over the horizon, and using that knowledge/perspective/thought-leadership to help shape the path of my company’s products, as well as to help customers understand how to get the most value out of what they have today, and what is coming their way.

With that perspective, you can see why it may appear that myself and others sometimes seem like we’re pushing back on the latest/greatest technologies, when the reality is that we understand better than most the impacts of these new technologies – and how they can (and can’t) extend the value of what our customers have in place today.

There are those who think that because some of us in the community push back on the market positioning that places cloud over on premises that somehow we don’t “understand.” Quite the contrary, we understand the marketing messaging and where Microsoft is trying to take the company and the technology, but my job is to stand up for the requirements of my customers, and help them to parse through what is marketing and what can help them derive value from what is coming out of Redmond. And most of the time, those customers want to extend the platforms and investments they’ve made to date BEFORE they build out something entirely new. Nothing wrong with getting a return on your investment. The challenge for ISVs like my company, of course, is to help companies through this transition – offering solutions for both on prem installs, for pure cloud solutions, and for everything in between.

Honestly, I feel completely validated by the messaging that came out of WPC in Houston this year, which essentially backed up my position that on premises deployments of SharePoint will continue, and that a large portion of current customers will either never move to the cloud (35% of current customers), or will do so over a slow ramp through hybrid solutions (50% in the next 3 to 5 years) so that they can achieve their ROI, as well as transition people, policies, and technologies toward the cloud.  There are tremendous achievements being made by the Microsoft product teams, and value being created for customers with every iterative release, and included in every announcement – but this transition is going to take time, and SharePoint on premises will continue to be a force to be reckoned with in the industry.

If you’ve never seen one of my conference sessions, I tend to take a business analyst / project management perspective on most topics. At the center of every PM plan is the need to identify and mitigate risks – the earlier you can detect them and have a plan in place for each, the lower the cost of mitigating those risks. While we may not have a crystal clear roadmap of what will come in the next SharePoint on premises release (yes, there will be more on prem releases, per Microsoft) nor a release date for v.Next, we all have a macro-view of the move toward the cloud, and its time for all of us to start identifying the risks for our SharePoint environments, and building out those mitigation plans.

Making community a Strategic Activity

Sitting in the MVP Summit this week on Microsoft campus in Redmond, I’ve been thinking a lot about community. The SharePoint community is a lively bunch – and very much similar to what I remember from my interactions with the Rational Software crowd back in the late 1990’s: energetic, passionate, and technically astute. Almost every session this week has ended (and some even started) with Q&A with the Microsoft product or engineer teams who were presenting, which is my favorite part. I love cutting through the prepared content (much of which tends to be heavy on the marketing messaging) and getting right to the heart of the real-world issues we all experience with our customers.

The value of this MVP community to Microsoft is massive, and yet some feel (including me) that Microsoft sometimes forgets this. Thankfully not this week – everyone seems to be really on the ball, and feedback has been positive from both MVPs and from the Microsoft people I’ve talked with. It seems that everyone is getting some value.

A key question every enterprise must ask at some point: How do we measure the value of community? Some companies are better than others at tracking their community activities. I’m doing a couple external community activities by using Yammer, which has become my de facto platform for external collaboration (sorry, Office365). some organizations do community-building through more structured tools, such as through their CRM platforms where every customer interaction is tracked as a separate activity, and every aspect of their customer and partner relationships is measured.

Honestly, organizations need to improve their ability to mine this data, looking for trends, better interpreting and taking action on customer feedback. Of course, you cannot measure something if you are not doing anything – so you could say that community + measurement = opportunities to iterate and improve.

Community is viewed by and large as a qualitative activity -- a way of reaching out to customers and partners to improve relationships, and to build trust -- but organizations still need to be able to quantify the value of those qualitative activities.

As you create or participate in community activities, think about the following questions:

• Are we properly tracking our community activities?
  How are you defining your community activities, and how are you capturing them within your CRM or other systems? Maybe it was a user group, or maybe you connected with a prospective partner while participating in a job fair. You might track two activities differently if one is an online activity, and the other required someone to jump on an airplane to participate. Both may drive value, but without proper tracking and measurements, you won't have an accurate view of the cost of participating.
  
• How are we measuring community-influenced activities?
  Assuming you have defined the types of community activities, you also need to measure the weight (value) of each outcome, such as whether the activity drove downloads, sales, or some other important KPI. Flying someone around the globe may result in wonderful feedback from dozens of customers, but may not provide the ROI that an enterprise hopes to get out of every community activity. Sometimes the benefit is improved relations, or good will. But for most organizations, it is also about decreasing costs (such as support) and increasing revenue. Understand your organizational goals for each community activity so that you can track which ones are the most successful.
  
• Are we investing in tools that encourage deeper community involvement?
  All of this tracking can mean a lot of overheard. Some companies employ full-time operations personnel to keep things organized, while others seek to build or buy tools to automate. How much visibility do you have into your social activities? How quickly are you able to adjust your systems and processes based on what you learn? And what kinds of tools are you making available to your own teams -- as well as your customers and partners -- to enable more accurate metrics and reporting?

These days, I don’t believe community is an option – it is essential to business, no matter what industry you find yourself. It is a key method for identifying prospective customers and partners. It is a great way to develop relationships with customer and partners, moving beyond the transactional sale and into a more empathetic, solution-focused relationship. And it can be the best way to find out what trends are happening, what customers are thinking, and what competitors are doing.

Are you ready for this change to your business? Do you have the right level of visibility, and the right tools and processes to track and measure your community activities? Time to start planning.

Controlling Sprawl Means Process+Culture

One of the reasons SharePoint grew so quickly over the past decade was due to the strict controls placed on many corporate portals, or from a general lack of collaboration support from IT teams. Installing a free version of SharePoint was pretty straight-forward and simple, and would quickly catch on and spread across a team, between teams, and then throughout the corporate landscape. The whole idea of collaboration sprawl reminds me of the 35 years I lived in Northern California, watching home development spread in every direction, in most cases without a master plan – causing traffic gridlock and other infrastructure issues, which, in large part, helped create the housing collapse years later.

Within our organizations, we forced IT to take a look at “this SharePoint thing” and to provide us with more flexible options for collaboration, many times at the expense of structured collaboration and sound governance principles – which may have come back to bite us later. But in the heat of the moment, when we were all desperate to just get our work done, we fought against these outdated concepts, thinking to ourselves, "We're growing fast, so we need to be flexible and dynamic. We don't need process or bureaucracy."

But why is it that "fast and flexible" is viewed as mutually exclusive of "stable and scalable" when it comes to systems and repeatable processes?

Consider this example: An externally-facing corporate portal is open to customers, maintained by IT, with content owned by Marketing. Nothing inherently wrong with this scenario. But when several major customers contact a VP late Sunday night because a page link is broken or content is wrong, who gets the call? Not the guys in Marketing. No, its the folks in IT Operations. Who is ultimately responsible for content and the portal? Marketing wants the ability to build sites and edit on the fly, and IT wants to ensure environments and features work before pushing them out in front of the customer.

End users and managers want the flexibility and autonomy to serve their customers without having to jump through hoops. Sometimes all it takes is a one day delay to lose a customer, so companies need to be responsive to win business, and to support their customers. The vast majority of IT organizations want nothing more than to deliver that flexibility and control to responsible end users – but they are also tasked with supporting the underlying infrastructure, whether they maintain that infrastructure on premises or manage one or more hosted services on their end user’s behalf.

Managing collaboration sprawl is as much about changing your company culture as it is about refining your processes. Mention the word “governance,” and people automatically assume that power is somehow being taken away from them. But there is shared ownership in a healthy governance strategy – and understanding that shared ownership is more of a cultural issue than a matter of documenting policies and procedures. The problem here is not control of the content management system or the overall quality assurance process, but healthy communication between IT and end users, and a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished – both from an end user perspective (fast provisioning, autonomy, service-level agreements with IT) and an IT perspective (defined policies and procedures, agreed upon response times, change management model).

Good collaboration is definitely a cultural skill. The organizations who are best at collaboration are often those with mature cultures that have clearly defined change management models that facilitate understanding and execution. The first step to every solution is always to sit down and discuss the requirements and come to a shared understanding -- before any solution is proposed. After all, until you have a clear picture of the problem space, how can you be sure you're solving the right problem?

Building a Brand

"If your brand walked into a bar, what would it start talking about?"

~Lisa Moretti, Gartner

A common mistake is thinking that your corporate branding – your logo, tagline, and chosen color palette – constitutes your brand. Sure, these things play a role in your branding, but they are just one small facet of your overall brand. More than any design elements, it is your company culture and the reputation of your front-line employees that define your company brand – which is why it is essential that you understand who inside your company is influential outside your company.

Most companies do not understand who the influencers are within their customer communities, and how to tailor their messages to those influencers. Even more elusive than a strategy for external influencers is a plan for internal influencers, and yet these people are often the eyes and the hands for an organization. As a technology evangelist, my role is a bit more clear-cut than what most organizations have in place, but I can tell you that it took a couple years at my last company for their to figure out how to utilize my skills, or in how to measure my success. But just because something is difficult to measure does not mean that its perceived value is amiss. Whether you have someone dedicated to building out your corporate brand, like an evangelist, or you take the time to ensure each customer interaction provides the right branding message, the secret is to at least try to measure the effects.

Measuring the Brand Effect

I’ve written a number of times on the difficulties surrounding marketing measurements. Even operational metrics should be monitored closely, as it is human nature to modify our behaviors as we begin to understand the ways in which we are being measured. For example, most operations teams have some sort of ticketing system in place, and a common measurement is the time to resolve an open ticket. As people understand this metric and how it plays into their own employment measurement, they modify their behaviors to improve the metric – often times in a way that does not benefit the customer or the business. You can’t blame the employee for following human nature. It just means that you need to constantly fine tune or adjust your metrics based on these human adjustments. But the real data is not about the average time it takes to close a ticket – but whether than average is changing over time. What you want to measure is not the performance of one individual’s handling of a single ticket, but their average performance over time. Is their performance improving? How does it compare to others on the team? Much more useful data than the singular activity.

Similarly, performance of a single email campaign or reception of a single webinar or presentation is not as useful as looking at multiples over time. Using marketing methodologies such as A/B testing is an improvement, but even there an organization will not use the one test, but test repeatedly, learning from each result as they refine their over all strategy. I’ve presented some SharePoint sessions at events which seemed to land hard on unyielding audiences, while in other locations the same topic with minimal edits has brought in large crowds and high ratings.

Figuring out how to translate these learnings into your own brand management strategy is not easy – and honestly, for many it is a source of competitive advantage. No two companies are going to follow the same strategy to building their brands, and therefore the measurements will be different for each. Based on my experience, however, there are three main components to brand building, each of which should be measured:

Message. There are several elements to a strong marketing message, including relevance, audience, and tone, among others. Over time, certain messaging will seem to resonate with customers, and patterns begin to appear.

Delivery. Who is delivering the message can be as important to how it is delivered. Personal style plays a major role. For example, I have a very colloquial style to how I write and present. it’s very conversational, and invites participation – and, I feel, resonates equally with user groups and with executives. But then again, my personality plays a huge role. I may take different delivery paths depending on audience. While my messaging remains the same, my delivery might change based on the questions being asked, on the customer scenarios the audience is most concerned about, or whether or not my jokes and anecdotes seem to be landing. Over time, I have learned to use certain stories, themes, or use cases based on prior successes.

Volume. When capturing metrics of any kind, the larger the data set, the more accurate the measurement. If you stopped an approach or marketing strategy after the first customer, you wouldn’t learn much about your product or your strategy. The same does for any branding strategy. The more data you can gather, the more customer feedback you can receive, the more you can measure and learn about how to refine your strategy.

Honestly, I have a love/hate relationship with metrics. You cannot claim success in anything if you cannot measure it (well, except for love, I suppose). The problem I have with them is that most people try to manage-to-the-metrics rather than learn from the metrics, and THEN manage. Too many people try to manage via spreadsheet, and in the end, they get the metrics all wrong. It’s not about a point in time, but about what they tell you over time.

Focusing on External Influencers

At the Gartner event in San Diego earlier this year, one of the customer stories that really stood out to me was about how the Nokia marketing team approached their brand-building activities, separating advocates from customers within their CRM, and then developing individual strategies for each. Part of their approach is/was to specifically flag each influencer, and nurture them individually. Obviously, you wouldn’t want to treat every customer the same way – what motivates one, making them an advocate for your brand, might be very different from another influencer. Similarly, how your internal influencers approach brand building for your company may be very different.

With the rapidly growing marketing specialization of brand influence, we’re beginning to understand the importance of influence by topic, and not just general influence. Sounds obvious, I know, and yet in messaging, in delivery, and in volume of marketing we tend to treat all customers the same – and then wonder why people don’t easily become advocates for our brand.

One very successful branding strategy – and a way to support the unique value add of your internal influencers – is by matching internal branding strengths to external influencer needs, wherever possible. For example, you have your marketing messaging that you’re testing out, moving forward with, and it is being delivered by your evangelist, your product management team, and your solutions sales team. You have a regular cadence of webinars, emails, and live events, and you’re confident you have a solid approach with message, delivery, and volume.

Now, as you learn about your partners and customers, measuring the success of these various marketing activities, the real test of your strategy – and the measurement of your brand – will come through the exceptions. Influencers begin to identify themselves: a customer loves your product, and happily joins a webinar or co-presents at an event on your behalf, but struggles with your sales process and handing off leads because it does not have the personal connection necessary for a successful hand-off.

How your company handles these influencer relationships, responds to this exception, or the creation of a new process, is the culmination of all of these moving parts. Can you measure these components? Probably. Should lack of measurements keep you from taking the right steps, ensuring you keep your influencer (and advocate) happy?

Finding the Right Flavor of SharePoint

In case you missed the marketing messaging, Microsoft is "all in" on the cloud, and is pushing fairly hard on their new offerings, from Office365 and SharePoint Online, to Yammer and SkyDrive Pro. For many organizations, these tools are an amazing introduction into the Microsoft collaboration platform that many enterprises have been using and benefitting from for more than a decade. Still other organizations who have made heavy investments in on premises versions of SharePoint -- the leading document management and collaboration platform -- are now making difficult decisions about whether to move from their existing SharePoint environment to the latest version of the platform, which may include moving some or all of their assets into the cloud.

While there is definitely a lot of hype around "the cloud," the reality for the SharePoint platform is that this decision is in front of us all: do we remain on premises or move to the cloud? And is now even the time to move to SharePoint 2013 at all, or do we augment what we have today? There are many options available, from architectures to hosting options, and from social collaboration solutions to workflow tools. SharePoint has always been the "Swiss Army knife" of collaboration, allowing an organization to extend it beyond the basic features, supplement it via custom configurations and third-party solution, or to integrate and pair it with other tools like Microsoft Office and the Dynamics platform to enrich the overall end user experience. SharePoint's rich history has shown us that, if anything, CIOs and their SharePoint administrators have many options into how they design their platforms and build out environments that best meet their individual business needs.

Despite the options available, these are not easy decisions. Many organizations are struggling with their strategies for moving forward. My advice? Don't move forward until you understand your business needs, what the various platform options can and cannot provide (because all versions are not equal), and what it will cost (hardware, software, people, ongoing management, risk) to get there. I often refer to this kind of decision as "Project Management 101," because its pretty much the same analysis and risk assessment you should give to any project.

People are constantly asking "Should I move to SharePoint 2013 on premises, or to Office 365." Unfortunately, they never like hearing the generic "it depends" answer, but it really does depend on what you are trying to accomplish, what your content and data governance/compliance/security guidelines will allow, what your end users expect from the experience, and the degree of complexity (integrations, customizations, or apps) you plan to include in your environment.

Some thoughts on your available options:

You can stick with your current on prem deployment. There is nothing wrong with making the most of your existing SharePoint investments. Let's face it -- SP2010 is a stable platform, and may be delivering solid value to your business. While you should definitely weigh the costs of managing the infrastructure, maintaining the necessary support and development expertise in house to keep things running, and any other 3rd party or educational costs, the numbers may lean in the direction of keeping things where they are -- at least for the time being.

As your end users begin asking for features and capabilities not available out of the box -- such as social collaboration, or deeper line of business application integrations -- make sure you adequately identify the costs of enhance the existing toolset, either through custom development or through the partner ecosystem. There are still many customers on older versions of SharePoint, such as 2007 or 2003 (I haven't run across many SPS2001 installations for a while). In these cases, I'd say that there is even less of a reason to stick with your current system, and to consider jumping ahead to 2013.

You can begin moving assets to the cloud by using Office365. When you bundle the power of SharePoint with the #1 enterprise email platform in the world and the most economically-priced communication tools out there, how can you not see the value of moving to the cloud? But the real story here is not as much about the capability of the solutions as their delivery method: is your business goal to develop and maintain SharePoint hardware and software expertise, or to run your business? Do you want to constantly test and deploy patches, updates, and new features -- or let the system handle these remotely? That is the power of cloud. While there may not yet be complete parity between on prem and Office365 versions of SharePoint, you can bet there soon will be.

Of course, for some organizations, the lack of parity between platforms is key. Many companies extended SharePoint to meet their unique business requirements, using it as their central collaboration hub. The costs of re-architecting these platforms in the cloud (possibly using Windows Azure) may be expensive, or not yet possible due to limitations of Azure or the SharePoint APIs. Before you run head-first into talks with Office365, take the time to understand what workloads, customizations, and features are essential to your business so that you can accurately map them to Office365's available features.

I should also point out that O365 is not the only option for moving to the cloud: there are a number of solution providers that offer cloud solutions, including AWS, Apptix, Rackspace and others.

You can upgrade to the latest on prem version, SharePoint 2013. Yes, that's right -- you can stick with your server-based platform. It is not going away. Microsoft recognizes that a percentage of organizations will never be able to move SharePoint activities to the cloud -- whether because of compliance and regulatory issues, or out of perceived (or real) data security issues. In these cases, there will continue to be an on premises version of SharePoint available.

As with organizations who plan to stay with their 2010 environments, there are advantages (customization and integration flexibility) and disadvantages (slower update/new feature release cadence from Microsoft). As you review your SharePoint strategy, make sure to discuss your requirements and concerns with your Microsoft rep, as they do listen to feedback from customers on which features and capabilities within SharePoint Online (office365) should be prioritized for release to the SharePoint 2013 on premises version.

You can move some assets into the cloud, but maintain on prem assets. Hybrid will likely be a popular solution for the next few years as the online platform matures, and as organizations slowly migrate their on prem assets toward the cloud model. Some advice for organizations considering this model: be sure that you thoroughly understand the governance and administrative overheard of managing two platforms. For example, Office365 provides some great tools and reporting for management of your SharePoint Online environments, but the granularity of this data -- and your ability to dig into log files -- is very different than what is available on prem. As part of your platform requirements and planning, be sure to map out your reporting and governance requirements in detail, and thoroughly understand the gaps between platforms.

As you begin to think about your SharePoint plans, remember to do your homework on what you need, what is possible, and where there are gaps. I was talking with one customer about their decision to move over to Office365 based on the enhanced BI capabilities, but they were shocked to hear that they would have to put their critical financial data in O365 to enable that key functionality. In this case, their governance and regulatory standards would not allow them to put this data in the cloud, and so they had to go back and re-think their overall strategy.

You should migrate to the latest version when it makes sense for your business to do so -- not because a vendor tells you its time to move. The reality is that security or regulatory issues may require you to keep certain assets on premises, while other assets and workloads can easily fit into the cloud model. As always, make informed decisions about how to move forward.

Inside the SharePoint Actors Studio

If you’re going to miss SharePoint Saturday Kansas City this weekend, you’re going to miss something that might be absolutely fantastic, or it could be a complete #fail. Thankfully, if it falls flat, I’m not going down alone – I’ll take down Ruven Gotz (@ruveng) and Michelle Caldwell (@shellecaldwell) with me ;-) More on that in a minute…

I fly out in the morning (Thursday) for one of three SharePoint Saturdays that I’ll be attending before the end of the year, closing out what has been another banner year for travel and events. Nothing close to last year’s almost 320,000 flying miles (which is just insane), but I believe I will have presented at over 35 events this year….which does not include conferences where I simply attended as a participant, a number of SPUG activities where I was there to learn, dozens of on-site customer and partner visits, and a steady stream of webinars, podcasts, and video chats. I send out an internal newsletter of sorts each month that catalogs all of my activities – more or less so that the salespeople are better aware of new content and upcoming events where I may be participating within their assigned territories – and am always amazed to look back over the months at how much has been accomplished, and to help me remember when certain activities took place.

But here is a quick snapshot of my upcoming SPS events, and what I’ll be presenting at each:

SharePoint Saturday Kansas City (#SPSKC)
November 9th, 2013
The University of Kansas Edwards Campus  - BEST Conference Center

My first session at 8:45am is an introduction to SharePoint 2013, which is great for end users who are not yet familiar with the platform and want a better understanding of its features: 10 Best Productivity Features in SP2013 You Need to Know About

My second session at 11:15am is a closer look at SharePoint 2013 social features, with a discussion around productivity and gamification. While still a beginners session, it assumes some basic understanding of SharePoint and Yammer social capabilities, but has a strong focus on finding business value in social: Productivity, Gamification, and SP2013

And at 3:30pm, Ruven, Michelle and I plan to break the keynote mold a bit, and it should not be missed. I’ll be honest here – you may not learn a whole lot about SharePoint during this keynote, but it promises to be very entertaining. [the image above, and this blog title, are subtle hints into the direction we’ll be taking things…]
Not. To. Be. Missed.

Later this month, and after participating in the MVP Summit on Microsoft campus, I’ll be heading to warmer climates:

SharePoint Saturday Phoenix (#SPSPhoenix)
November 23rd, 2013
Arizona State University Memorial Union

I’ve been invited to give the keynote, beginning at 8:15am, entitled Inside the Social Organization: Strategies for Structured and Unstructured Collaboration which will provide some great insight into extending your collaboration strategy to include mobile, social, and the cloud.

My first regular session at 10:15am will be the very popular Productivity, Gamification, and SP2013

And my second regular session at 2:20pm will be What Governance Looks Like in the Cloud, which, like many of my sessions, touches on planning best practices and risk mitigation of moving your assets from an on prem model to the cloud.

After the family chaos of another Thanksgiving holiday, I’ll be traveling to Chicago for a partner event and to South Florida for an AIIM.org event, but I’ll also be heading to DC:

SharePoint Saturday DC (#SPSDC)
December 7th, 2013
Microsoft Reston

I’m not sure yet which session I’ll be giving, but I’ll be there.

To some of you, this seems like a lot of travel. To me, this is a nice, quiet, calm way to end the year. I have a few writing projects underway, and have a few exciting initiatives I’m driving for Q1. You know, what with being acquired a couple months back, and all.

Hope to see you out on the road!