The End Run and User Empowerment

This article was originally posted on April 24, 2008.

This is one of those themes that keeps cropping up:

• the KM forum at Bentley College
• a paper written by the Yankee Group: “Zen and the Art of Rogue Employee Management,” and
• this article in InformationWeek magazine about the “IT End Run.”

When I try to boil it down in my own head, these data points together lead me to the following advice for CIOs:

Given the rise of consumer technologies in the enterprise, CIOs MUST find ways to provide business users with new capabilities they demand in a way that is consistent with good governance, or else users will find ways to get them on their own outside of the “good governance” umbrella.

I see SharePoint as both an appealing and a dangerous option for tackling this problem. It is advertised as a set of tools and application platform for solving many business problems (business intelligence, collaboration, search, etc.), under the umbrella of a centrally managed access and security model that works with the rest of a (Microsoft-centric) enterprise’s tools.

I frequently encounter IT and executive managers excited by this prospect, and one of my favorite bloggers has written a very insightful series of articles about why “soft” thinking on this point puts many SharePoint projects in peril. I encourage you to read all four parts of the series — Paul is quite a prolific writer. Ignore this advice at your peril, and bear in mind this data point from the Yankee Group study:

86% of workers surveyed in this study used an unsupported tool at work to boost their productivity.

Proceed with caution, CIOs, but proceed you must!

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.