SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Architect's Guidebook

12

Defining Your SharePoint 2010 Portal Strategy

By Brian Wilson

The phrase that I hear most often when helping organizations implement collaboration and portal technologies is, “SharePoint is the answer, but what is the question?” Although most organizations identify the need to exploit collaboration and portal technologies, they often fail to clearly research, define, and articulate the business drivers these technologies must support.

This may occur for a number of reasons, which could include the following:

• In some organizations, the strategy stage of an IT project tends to focus more on driving funding and project approval, rather than on than developing a clear understanding of the issues occurring in the business domain. Only after project and funding approval, the project team may then shift to the detailed requirements-gathering stage.
• The project starts in the IT department and remains in the IT department. There may be no clear engagement, involvement, and research by senior leaders and business stakeholders in the strategy stage.
• Focus may be centered largely on a set of capabilities and services, rather than on a more balanced approach that defines the business improvements the technology must support.
• A technology-, feature-, and platform-centric orientation is undertaken, rather than a business- and user-centric approach. This may be because of the challenge of a large, complex, and dispersed business environment with many stakeholders and differing requirements. ...