SharePoint Governance: Needed Now More than Ever

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Tweetjam about SharePoint. One of the topics that came up was the importance of Governance. In this article I want to dive deeper into this topic and stress how important governance is within your environment. 

Governance can simply be defined as a set of controls in place to ensure that your SharePoint environment remains stable, accessible and highly responsive. These are controls that you put in place to keep the environment from becoming the black hole of misplaced and misused content.

Governance in many cases, seems to be the latest buzz word, the thing that all environments have to have in order to get the stamp of approval for following best practices. The simple truth however, is that it doesn’t matter what you call it or how you manage it, as long as it is getting done.

Here are a few simple questions that I like to ask that help you see the types of areas that are typically covered in a governance plan.

1. Why SharePoint? What purpose does SharePoint serve in your organization?
2. If a user wants to create a new solution and they think SharePoint is a good fit for what they need, how do they go about creating one?
3. Who in the organization has attended SharePoint training?
4. Are there quotas in place within your environment to help control how large solutions can become?
5. How does the typical user within your environment use SharePoint?

In a nutshell, a Governance plan should outline what the intended use of your environment is and then provide guidance on how users can successfully use the environment as a tool to increase their success within the organization. Once the goals are set and the process is outlined, you then look at what needs to be put in place to ensure that the environment can fulfill its intended purposes. Governance is really nothing more than creating a roadmap and then building a road to successfully reach the final destination.

Starts with the Business

The first step to any good plan is knowing where we are going. In terms of SharePoint, this means we need to understand the goals of implementation. The goals will greatly determine how we move forward and should be the guide to all things we do.

These goals should generate within the business and should be based on business needs and not technology. If we based our plans on the technology alone, we can definitely miss the mark. The goals should be owned by a single point of contact, even if that contact is a committee that is working together. These goals will help determine what we configure within SharePoint, so they need to have strong backing and encompass a large vision of the organization.

The more these goals align with the overall goals of the organization, the more successful overall user adoption will be. This is due to the fact that users will more rapidly adopt the toolset because they can see how using the toolset will help them achieve the greater goals of the organization.

It Doesn’t End with the Business

Once the business comes together and works through a set of goals for the implementation, it is important for the business to continue to work with the system administrators and developers to help develop the actionable plan to move forward with the SharePoint implementation.

While it is true that the best governance plans start with the business, it is also true that the only truly successful governance plans include information from all areas of expertise. System administrators know better than anyone how to best maintain the environment to ensure long term usability and impact. By working together, the best of both sides meet in the middle, allowing for users to have access to stable, reliable systems that help them achieve real world goals.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Is Marketing Absorbing IT's Role for Marketing Automation? #BMAthriving

As the role of marketing grows with importance within organizations, budgets have begun to shift as well. With marketing becoming increasingly technology based, it now stands as an indisputable driver of IT purchases. So much so that Gartner research predicts that by 2017, CMOs will have larger IT budgets than CIOs.

That was the discussion at a recent Business Marketing Association (BMA) regional conference in Denver. The event was designed to bring together both marketing and IT executives to facilitate conversations on how to better work together as roles, processes and outcomes continue to evolve.

Two closely tied panels during the day included demand generation and marketing automation. Speakers from the corporate, agency and technology spheres shared their perspectives on current challenges and future trends for both demand gen and marketing automation.

No Small Change

Raab Associates predicts that 2012 revenues for B2B marketing automation systems will jump 60 percent, surpassing the 50 percent spike in 2011. Reaching US$ 525 million in revenues this year will certainly underscore the fact that not only do enterprises lean heavily on marketing automation, so do SMBs. This means that companies can now take smarter action in connecting with their customers and prospects, and also can track what’s working, what isn’t and rapidly adjust.

No More Random Acts of Marketing

Marketers need to think first about the early stages that encompass integrated marketing management — the operations side of the house. By better understanding their processes, one company streamlined enough to increase its productivity threefold. Now, they’re also able to consistently measure their results and make smarter decisions once they engage with a prospect.

One of the transitions that panelists see from marketing holding control of their IT infrastructure, is that the skillsets that marketers need as technologists vary drastically from that of the IT department. Today’s marketers need to understand how to align the processes, platforms and people in order to accomplish business goals of the organization. This requires knowing how a technology infrastructure helps move them in the right direction faster.

What are the top things that companies can do to make their demand gen and marketing automation programs more effective today?

1. Clean up your database: Data is everything to a marketer. Make sure yours is clean and that you’ve removed emotionally disengaged contacts. Once complete, you’ll immediately have a much clearer picture of your reach and effectiveness and how to woo sales qualified leads (SQLs).
2. Make your content relevant: Speak to your audience from a buyer’s perspective, not yours as the seller. Keep content current. Understand your goals for the next 12 months and how you expect to interact with prospects. Automation puts the right content in front of the right buyer at the right time.
3. Rally the troops: We’ve moved beyond the traditional art and copy aspect of marketing, and now have to integrate code into all of our decisions. This means getting everyone together — marketing, IT, sales and finance — in the same room early to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) and understand the path to reach them.
4. Know your KPIs: While SQLs tend to serve as the ROI metric for most companies, those with a more sophisticated outlook have a model that allows them to push deeper into the funnel. With data feedback on multiple areas, marketers will then understand what KPIs have the most meaning, and let technology help make these areas even more effective.

What’s on the Horizon?

With all that’s changing and at such a rapid pace, understanding tomorrow’s trends is paramount for making decisions today. These panelists had consensus on a few key directions for the future:

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Solving Problems with Authority and Sharing: Developments and Prospects #saa12

The Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC) project is an ambitious one that seeks to locate records of historical importance across repositories and make them available to patrons on a massive scale. Our panel updated us on its fascinating progress. Look at what we records and information management professionals can do.

The Society of American Archivists (SAA) 2012 annual meeting, “Beyond Borders," concluded Saturday, August 11, 2012 in San Diego.

Tammy Peters of the Smithsonian Institute introduced her panel:

• Ray R. Larson (University of California, Berkeley)
• Daniel Pitti (University of Virginia, Institute for Advanced Technology in Humanities) 
• Jerry Simmons (National Archives and Records Administration).

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project: Status Report

Ray R. Larson

Mr. Larson delivered an update to SNAC. Officially, the goals of the project are to further the transformation of archival description and to separate description of records from description of people documented in them. Translation: the project is meant to make available records of historical importance and

• enhance access to archives resources, through all cultural heritage resources; and
• enhance understanding of those resources.

We’re talking big data. With a sample of 150,000 EAD-encoded finding aids contributed from around the world by national libraries and others, including:

• Library of Congress
• National Archives and Records Administration
• Smithsonian Institution
• British Library
• Archives nationales (France)
• Bibliothèque nationale de France
• OCLC WorldCat and VIAF 
• Getty Vocabulary Program.

Institutes like the Getty Vocabulary Program have contributed a union list of artist names (make that: 293,000 personal and corporate names).

The problem: a proliferation of the forms of names (for example, different people with the same names). EAD records are full of family names and within the structure it notes the creator of the archive (typically the complete autobiography is provided). This autobiography is extracted to the Encoded Archival Context for Corporate Bodies, Persons, and Families records (EAC-CPF) record.

We’re given names — sometimes multiple names. Identical names means a complete Library of Congress record with attributes is available. If it’s an exact match, it’s marked. But marking doesn’t work for everything. Abbreviations are troublesome — think transliteration of non-roman characters. We take names where we didn’t get an exact match, then test against library authority files. Do we find an exact match? We flag it as a potential merge. Is nothing matched by this stage? We create overlapping segments of three characters. Finally, we take all flagged as potential matches, do a find, make sure these are the ones we want. With the authoritative form of the name, we combine all EAC-CPF records. To give you an idea of volume, a recent test merged 93,033 person names from 114,639 person records," said Larson

In other words, the names are extracted from EAC-CPF and from existing EAD. If the EAC-CPF records match against one another and against existing authority records (for example, VIAF), then prototypes of historical resources and accessibility are created.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

Mobile Development Platform AnyPresence Debuts with Strong Enterprise Ties

More and more enterprise companies are cluing into the importance of mobile app development platforms and ecosystems, and new player AnyPresence just might have the right mix of security and agility for many businesses.

AnyPresence just raised over US$ 5 million in funding for its push into the enterprise, but because its founders are former SAP and Oracle executives, there is already plenty of familiarity with what businesses are likely to need. 

Enterprise Mobile Looking More like Consumer Mobile

Yes, there are many other options for building both native and HTML5 apps, but AnyPresence is looking to do what many have fallen short on: bring enterprise level functions without a huge price tag or army of developers.

AnyPresence promises robust apps without the coding know how, and adds the flexibility to go deeper if that coding knowledge is available. In other words, build apps using AnyPresence templates, or use in-house know how for more robust features and design.

Security, Support and Extensibility

Because AnyPresence is cloud based, it's good for small or large businesses, and there are private hosting options available for those who want in house solutions. Additionally, this allows AnyPresence apps the ability to work well across multiple devices like tablets, laptops and smartphones. This is obviously a key feature because so many people want to access their data from wherever they happen to be. 

Build apps in the cloud right from any browser

That's why security is so important, and why features like 128-bit SSL client/server communication, regularly scheduled backups and SAS70 Type II certified data hosting providers are baked right into AnyPresence. It's good news for behind the firewall content, but open source APIs are also available for more forward facing needs. 

Any company looking to get into the mobile app game would do well to check out the AnyPresence platform. It's not just a tool kit for developers, but can be used in such a way for those who need it. For the rest of us DIYers, it's good to know there's another choice for building apps without being an engineer or programmer. For the enterprise, this is doubly important because of the sensitive nature of some data, and the resource consciousness inherent in the business. 

AnyPresence lets mobile apps connect to legacy systems, cloud based data or both

Extra Features

Not only can AnyPresence build internal apps for accessing existing IT systems, those same systems can be made accessible in whatever capacity is needed depending on the customer. This kind of flexibilty is key for large businesses who have different needs across different departments. Flexibility is also needed, however, for small companies who may need to change directions quickly or simply launch a new app in a short time span. 

AnyPresence makes it easy to include those who don't have smartphones. Millions of people use feature phones, the kind with no data connection, and for them, there's a handy interactive SMS messaging system that can be added to different app features. AnyPresence has training programs for the uninitiated, and professional services for those who need more design help or expert help with performance optimization. 

Tell us in the comments if you've built any DIY apps and if it was a good enough experience for you to try it again. 

 

 

Source : cmswire[dot]com