We need a team site. Will you create one for our organization? #collaboration #governance
We need a team site. Will you create one for our organization?
I would imagine this statement occurs thousands of times a day around the world. A new leader takes over a group, department or organization. They want a quick-win. People in their org are having trouble finding things, or they don’t know where to go to get info. Or the leader wants to put his/her stamp on the org. Granted, there are numerous beneficial reason to do this, but many times, this just makes things worse. Content is duplicated, redundant or conflicting. I worked with an organization that had 100,000 employees and 33,000 SharePoint sites. That was in addition to the Content Repositories and off-the-shelf KBs that the organization paid millions for licensing, customization and maintenance. With that in mind, there are a few things I do to “tap the brakes,” and slow the plans before a redundant system can be built. For instance solid sponsorship and governance helps provide order. KM Assessments and just asking “why” can help bring clarity. My questions to SIKM is…. As KM Professionals, what are some of your favorite tactics or best-practices to mitigate sprawl? How do you respond when someone proposes to create a new site?
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John - I think you already hit on my answer: ask “why?”. (Or, in my case, “for what?”).
Tell me what you’re doing now, what is working and not working about it, and what you think a ________ [fill in the blank with TeamSite or any tool du jour] will do to make things better. Of course, your question pre-supposes a locked-down approach to deployment. The other school of thought is “let a thousand flowers bloom.” In that case, proliferation isn’t seen as a bad thing - it’s organic growth, user-driven, and chaotic. Tom -- Tom Short Consulting All of my previous SIKM Posts |
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Lee Romero
Great question and definitely a challenge. I'm interested in insights from others for this. Tom's comment is a good way to frame it. A simple, concrete example that has always played out at my firm is Yammer groups. How many do we need about <pick a random topic>? Apparently *many* is the answer. When challenged with the "why" question Tom raises, though, I have heard many variations of: "Because that other group already exists and has an administrator and I don't want to steal that from them" (which seems altruistic to the other group in a sense, but it isn't really) or "Because I want my own" So even trying to "challenge" at that simplistic level doesn't help get us past that, unfortunately. Both of these still reflect a territoriality that is hard to get past. I'm hoping someone has some good examples - for Yammer groups or MS Teams or SharePoint sites or anything else for that matter. Regards Lee On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 1:05 PM Tom Short <tshortconsulting@...> wrote: John - I think you already hit on my answer: ask “why?”. (Or, in my case, “for what?”). |
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Robert L. Bogue
I’ve got an unfinished draft of a whitepaper that I’ve been working on that frames the “how many” question in terms of findability. Everyone here is welcome to take a look – it’s at How Many Teams Sites Libraries Folders.docx If you’ve got comments or concerns feel free to download a copy and send me a revised version – or let me know and I’ll get you an edit link so you can comment directly.
I think the more interesting thing for me might be… how do we explain the reasons why we don’t want another group since all of the reasons for another group they probably already understand.
------------------- Robert L. Bogue O: (317) 844-5310 M: (317) 506-4977 Blog: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog Are you burned out? https://ExtinguishBurnout.com can help you get out of it.
From: SIKM@groups.io <SIKM@groups.io> On Behalf Of
Lee Romero via Groups.Io
Sent: Friday, December 6, 2019 3:55 PM To: SIKM@groups.io Subject: Re: [SIKM] We need a team site. Will you create one for our organization? #kmers #sprawl #better practice
Great question and definitely a challenge. I'm interested in insights from others for this. Tom's comment is a good way to frame it.
A simple, concrete example that has always played out at my firm is Yammer groups. How many do we need about <pick a random topic>? Apparently *many* is the answer. When challenged with the "why" question Tom raises, though, I have heard many variations of:
"Because that other group already exists and has an administrator and I don't want to steal that from them" (which seems altruistic to the other group in a sense, but it isn't really)
or
"Because I want my own"
So even trying to "challenge" at that simplistic level doesn't help get us past that, unfortunately. Both of these still reflect a territoriality that is hard to get past.
I'm hoping someone has some good examples - for Yammer groups or MS Teams or SharePoint sites or anything else for that matter.
Regards Lee
On Fri, Dec 6, 2019 at 1:05 PM Tom Short <tshortconsulting@...> wrote:
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Here is what I have written about this topic:
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The question of scoping the "collaboration environments" (i.e. tools and structures which have been setup for collaborating within a particular scope) is a burning question for me as well. While we are using multiple collaboration tools together (typically at least Teams for communication, Confluence for most of the documentation and SharePoint for traditional document management), the question of scoping/structuring is an overarching topic as these tools together are (conceptually) forming a single collaboration environment together. Thus - in our case - it is really a question of identifying the right (high level) information architecture (i.e. "how does the landscape of collaboration environments look like?") and governance model (i.e. "how is this landscape of collaboration environments maintained and by whom?"). There we are currently thinking in the lines of having different collaboration environments by type (e.g. project collaboration environments or community (of practice) collaboration environments) where each type is governed by separate governance bodies, e.g. the community collaboration environments are governed by the communities program which also documents the landscape of communities (and their environments). Wonder how others are bringing structure into their collaboration landscapes where one single collaboration environment is the combination of a set of different tools...
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Robert L. Bogue
One of the challenges that I see with customers is that the more environments you have the more people tend to either 1) wonder which environment they should use for different needs and their confusion either ends in not doing anything or cross posting. or 2) They tend to only use the environment that they’re familiar with and there by ignore other potentially helpful places.
I’m always concerned when the governance is broken up into too many groups. It feels like there should be guiding principles that are shared across all of the platforms. In my opinion one of the problems we as consumers of the technology have is that even internal to companies like Microsoft, there’s competition between Teams and Yammer and this results in confusion in the market.
Rob
------------------- Robert L. Bogue O: (317) 844-5310 M: (317) 506-4977 Blog: http://www.thorprojects.com/blog Are you burned out? https://ExtinguishBurnout.com can help you get out of it.
From: SIKM@groups.io <SIKM@groups.io> On Behalf Of
Jan Hutter via Groups.Io
Sent: Tuesday, December 10, 2019 3:36 AM To: SIKM@groups.io Subject: Re: [SIKM] We need a team site. Will you create one for our organization? #kmers #sprawl #better practice
The question of scoping the "collaboration environments" (i.e. tools and structures which have been setup for collaborating within a particular scope) is a burning question for me as well. While we are using multiple collaboration tools together (typically at least Teams for communication, Confluence for most of the documentation and SharePoint for traditional document management), the question of scoping/structuring is an overarching topic as these tools together are (conceptually) forming a single collaboration environment together. Thus - in our case - it is really a question of identifying the right (high level) information architecture (i.e. "how does the landscape of collaboration environments look like?") and governance model (i.e. "how is this landscape of collaboration environments maintained and by whom?"). There we are currently thinking in the lines of having different collaboration environments by type (e.g. project collaboration environments or community (of practice) collaboration environments) where each type is governed by separate governance bodies, e.g. the community collaboration environments are governed by the communities program which also documents the landscape of communities (and their environments). Wonder how others are bringing structure into their collaboration landscapes where one single collaboration environment is the combination of a set of different tools...
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