Blogger: Craig Roth
In April of 2008, we released our advanced SharePoint workshop that describes how to offer "SharePoint as a service" by applying ITIL v3 to SharePoint. Alas, it's taken a while to start publishing this methodology in document form, but I just submitted the first paper on this subject. It's called "ITIL for SharePoint: Defining SharePoint as a Service using ITIL Service Strategy" and is due out in January.
Writing this document forced me to dig deeper into ITIL's best practices. Many of them transfer directly to SharePoint (like much of the operations and service desk parts), so I didn't waste time restating them with the word "SharePoint" in front. And some don't really apply at all, since SharePoint isn't the type of service that ITIL was originally created for. But by picking carefully through the best practices (and sometimes reshaping them to fit) a few real gems emerge. Those are the ones I concentrate on in the paper and workshop.
In the process of writing my paper, several points became clear that go against the countervailing wisdom I've seen among SharePoint implementers. I'll just give an encapsulated list in this entry so readers can have fun seeing if they can figure out how I justify these statements. I'll give my description of each item next week.
- Trying to squeeze the most from your SharePoint investment is probably not good for the company
- Value is different than ROI
- Management is different than governance
- Offering SharePoint as a business service is fundamentally different than offering it as a set of technological capabilities
- Users of SharePoint shouldn't know what SharePoint is
- "Driving adoption" is a band aid for poor demand management
- Internally, SharePoint always has competition; users always have a choice
- The process of applying a service methodology has value for the organization beyond just the end result
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