From the R/W/W post, the five key points in BAH’s success were:

• Empower Evangelists - “when many people think of an evangelist, they think of an individual or two that take up the mantle of enterprise 2.0 on an ad-hoc basis. But Booz Allen went about it in a much more directed way by bringing together a cross-functional team to develop and deploy the software.”
• Draw on Past Experience – “The fact that they drew on past attempts to understand just how they should move forward was a essential factor in the outcome…”
• Know Thyself - “…the real trick is having enough self-awareness as an organization to know when to discard the given wisdom.”
• Create a One-Stop-Shop – “…constructing more silos out of multiple enterprise 2.0 platforms creates more problems than you ever had with just email and filesharing.”
• Just Solve Problems for People – “…an unwavering focus on solving real problems for people within the firm, not aiming at the vague goal of boosting collaboration and openness.”

If you notice, none of these key success factors are really about technology, but instead they are all focused on organizationa behavior and business objectives.

Thomas Vanderwal just posted his long awaited commentary on Microsoft Sharepoint. It is an intriguing and insightful reporting of what Sharepoint users have reported to him over the past couple of years. In a nutshell, Thomas’s final commentary is that Sharepoint does some things well, just don’t call it social software. In his own words:

SharePoint does some things rather well, but it is not a great tool (or even passable tool) for broad social interaction inside enterprise related to the focus of Enterprise 2.0. SharePoint works well for organization prescribed groups that live in hierarchies and are focused on strict processes and defined sign-offs. Most organization have a need for a tool that does what SharePoint does well.

The post prompted a rebuttal from Bil Simser. Bil’s main counterpoint is built around the idea that though Sharepoint is not excellent in all areas, it does integrate all of its functions, which is a plus. In his words:

SharePoint is a lot of things and like a lot of “suites” it does a lot of things pretty good. Some pretty good, some great, some not so great.

Bil goes on to discuss how a best of breed approach only shifts time and expense over to the integration side as opposed to initial development of an overall enterprise system.

Focus on Requirements Definition

The underlying thread in both of these posts is that understanding and delivering user needs and requirements is paramount in delivery of any system. For any organization to begin a conversation about what information technology it needs with a discussion of the technology itself is a recipe for failure. The discussion of solutions must begin with a clear definition of business objectives. The discussion of technology should be the last link in the chain of conversations.

Maybe Hugh says it best: