Collaboration software shouldn't be deployed out of the box: Gartner
- 22 February, 2011 16:39
- Comments 3
IT managers implementing collaborative software such as SharePoint have been warned that simply installing applications out of the box will put strain on relationships throughout the business.
Speaking at the Gartner BI summit in Sydney, analyst Mark Gilbert said social software must be adapted to suit the needs of business functions across the enterprise.
“People are starting to change their perception of how they perceive their market, and SharePoint is a great example of one vendor’s offering of driving change through software,” Gilbert said.
“If you try to deploy something out of a box, you probably won’t have a good result. It’s all about teaming the project up with the business to see what they need.”
Gilbert said that using SharePoint as a flexible and agile tool is necessary if collaboration is to take place across the enterprise.
“There’s literally 15 ways that you could be doing SharePoint in your company right now,” he said. “The business drivers have changed for content management over the years...business processes have to be more adapted to business needs.”
The popularity of SharePoint has also been driven from the employee level, according to Gilbert.
“People want to use Wikis and blogs. They want simple ways of sharing information, and when people are trying to locate an expert on a topic, they are looking at the social tools to find the right people,” he said.
“IT is being used increasingly for blogs and Wikis and Sharepoint is a popular environment for content management.”
Gilbert said employees who have embraced social media are part of the group who have led the charge towards the introduction of products like SharePoint.
“These social tools represent a total lack of control. You don’t have a relationship with companies like Twitter and Facebook,” he said.
“How do you deal with internal social? Content about your business is being put out there. Companies don’t have a grasp on those issues as yet.”
Using collaborative tools to manage content in the enterprise has evolved, Gilbert said, adding it has moved from being about simply keeping records.
“The perception of what content and management are about has evolved a bit...people are now starting to see it as architecture,” he said.
“Even when you’re using SharePoint at the enterprise level...a lot of enterprises need to change things in order for this to work.”
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Comments
deb louison lavoy
1
I think this depends very much on the nature of what you're working with. Generic software that's a jumble of features that are not focused on a specific use case - especially yours, should not be deployed out of the box. Software that is very focused and thoughtfully designed to support the work of teams may be a different matter.
Denis Zenkin
2
Good point!
However, I believe the article should be titled "SharePoint shouldn't be deployed out of the box: Gartner".
Mike Tanner
3
This thread and the original comment by Gartner feels to me like a statement of the obvious. Historical financials of traditional enterprise software businesses shows that 25% of revenue is usually "services" - not licenses. This is typically from "customization." Beyond that, this 25% may be drastically understated - since a lot of customization occurs by IT or by consultants at time of implementation, and under separate contract. From my vantage point, all enterprise sotware - including "off-the-shelf" is either tailored upon implementation, or by the end-user group. It's just a matter of degree. The real issue that I see folks grapple with is whether one chooses to tailor off the shelf software or develop something entirely from scratch on a chosen platform.
IT departments can underestimate something that commercial software businesses live with: that software applications are simply never "done." Development and support goes on forever. Even when the benefits of building from scratch seem strong, this ongoing cost and risk can be a difficult issue to deal with unless software is your core business. So the relative costs of ownership over time and risks should be weighed vs. the perceived benefit of custom vs 'off-the-shelf' solutions. My opinion: "enterprise software" should add a layer of standard IP that shortens implementation time and lowers overall cost - including support. But I doubt if most solutions in this class will ever truly live up to the term "off the shelf."