SharePoint Expert Wants End Users to Change
September 21, 2009
Update: September 24, 2009. I found this article about users’ hatred of change germane to my September 21, 2009, article. Microsoft must have its own research to prove that users indeed love change and that end users think that learning new ways to do old tasks is the cat’s pajamas. See http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2009-09-24-n85.html.
Original post
I found “A Brief History of SharePoint (From a Relative Newcomer’s Perspective)” an amazing document. I think it provides considerable insight into how Microsoft Certified Professionals perceive the people in organizations—large and small. Google is an arrogant company, but the company does not do much more than put goodies in the wild. If people figure out how to use the technology, that’s fine. If the user doesn’t figure out Google technology, the company just goes about its business. Infuriating? Yes. Logical. Absolutely.
Read the “Brief History” and pay particular attention to this passage:
I think that SP 2010 is going to change the game a bit and it’s going to play out differently and in slow motion as companies roll out their SP 2010 solutions over 2010 and beyond. In order to succeed, End Users will need to transform themselves and get a little IT religion. They’ll need to learn a little bit about proper requirements analysis. They will need some design documentation that clearly identifies business process workflow, for instance. They need to understand fundamental concepts like CRUD (create, update and delete), dev/test/qa/prod environments and how to use that infrastructure to properly deploy solutions that live a nice long time and bend (not break) in response to changes in an organization.
I am not sure how end users in government agencies, non profit, mom and pop, consultancies, and other organizations are going to react to “need”, “learn”, and “properly deploy” computer solutions. In my opinion, the view is not arrogance. The impression I carry from this article is a weird inability to understand the reality of folks who have to use SharePoint. I do like the acronym CRUD. I could have used it as an adjective to describe the passage above. Just my opinion.
Stephen Arnold, September 21, 2009
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Comments
One Response to “SharePoint Expert Wants End Users to Change”
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I’m the author of the “A Brief History…” and I certainly take your point. I have a few thoughts in response.
Fundamentally, I should have made it more clear that there’s an important caveat there that goes something like this: “If End Users want to take advantage of these new features and be more than superficallially successful (or outright fail) then …”
I’m not demanding that end users change.
I also take your point about entire classes of organizations like mom and pop orgs in particular were not really in my head as I wrote the article.
My main point is that SP 2010 is opening up doors that were closed in the past to end users that, should they choose to do it, can now walk through. For that matter, SP 2010 is creating doors that never existed to end users. Whether they choose to walk through it or not is another story. How they take advantage of the goodies on the other side is also up to them.
I appreciate the thoughts even though you believe the central passage is CRUD 🙂