The Patient Consultant

SharePoint Summit 2009: Day 1

Day 1 of the SharePoint Summit in Montreal focused on morning and afternoon workshop sessions. As one of my primary interests is Business Process Management I attended Carmien Owens' presentation on Process Portals within SharePoint. The workshop sessions are 3.5 hours and Carmien did a great job of keeping everyone engaged throughout the workshop.

The best nuggets of information were shared in the first 90 minutes. See how to manually build pages in SharePoint is not particularly exciting but understanding the importance of mapping the business processes and understanding the context of information is far more interesting (at least to me). After all, SharePoint is a great tool but, as Carmen put it, "Using a screwdriver for a chisel is not particularly effective".

There were some interesting observations presented in the workshop session including:

• If time spent on the technical side of the solution (i.e. infrastructure, custom development) exceeds 25% of the total time on a project something is wrong
• Believes 80-85% of the process requirements can be addressed by SharePoint "Out of the Box"
• Gathering requirements for process portals can be broken down into 3 general groups
  • What do you do?
  • What information do you need to do what you do and who you do it with?
  • How would you prove success?

Although one could debate SharePoints ability to address 80-85% of the requirements out of the box I totally agree with Carmen's message. The impact of spending more time on the technology than on the understanding of the business will surely result in not meeting the expectations of the end users or the goals and objectives of the business. We miss the opportunity to find simpler solutions to problems if we believe every problem MUST be solved by custom development. In addition, proving success should be baked into every project plan. Why are we putting all our efforts into portals (or any information technology for that matter) if we cannot prove there is a measurable benefit to the organization?

I would suggest Carmen's illustration of process portals may not meet the value expectations in consideration of usability. The portal examples were not nice on the eyes and appeared, on first observation, to be particularly hard to navigate. However, I love the concept and, as such, give Carmen a high five for an awesome presentation!

BPM Solution Efficiency with AgilePoint

As complicated as some SharePoint solutions can become I witnessed a breath of fresh today in a demo of Ascentn's AgilePoint BPM Suite. In a nutshell the AgilePoint suite leverages Microsoft technology (Visio, SharePoint, .Net, InfoPath, and others) to enhance the efficiency of assessing, documenting, and developing solutions directly impacting business process. WOW, that's a mouthful; what exactly does that mean? More on that later as I want to talk about why this is important if you are building solutions in MOSS 2007. The challenges include:

• MOSS developers are in short supply so solution delivery can be delayed indefinitely. The business must go on regardless of availability
• Changes in business process are not easily managed in MOSS and will inevitably require more development time. See bullet point above as to why this is an issue
• In progress processes are difficult to manage from a change perspective. If the process requires change having to restart in-progress processes can be onerous and frustrating to customers/users of the solution
• Requirements can get lost in translation. Business stakeholders are too often dependant on developers availability while being removed from owning their own business processes

I could go on but these are the top of my list of issues. With AgilePoint, there is a solution. In comparison to other BPM solutions (i.e. K2.Net) it is extremely cost effective. It also leverages a well used business process tool in Visio by extending the stencil list to include over 100 popular services in Microsoft SharePoint, InfoPath, CRM, Biztalk, and others. When you build the business process in Visio you're actually building the solution. This allows Business Analysts to have a larger stake in translating the requirements and also provides a framework for developers to build custom solutions for a variety of business situations. Solutions are all XML based which means no code management and executables to build. The opportunities are endless!

There are too many details to discuss here but if you're curious check out the Ascentn website for more information. If you like what you see and have a need I can hook you up with the sales person at Ascentn to conduct a demonstration of the product. The bottom line is if you're invested in MOSS and want to improve the delivery of business process bases solutions, consider AgilePoint.

Screen Shot of AgilePoint's Envision Client (an extension to Visio)