Over the last two decades, the rapid developments in technology have changed the way we work – but have not always improved the way we work. Enterprise systems, like SAP and Siebel, provided excellent solutions to stable and unchanging enterprise-wide processes, for example, payroll and general ledger. But there are a lot of fluid, dynamic activities in a workplace that cannot be managed by enterprise systems – by the time you work out the process, the process itself has changed or your teams have matured their process capabilities beyond the initial process solution. So, while enterprise systems play an important role in managing corporate workloads, over time, the realization grew that enterprise systems do not provide the solution to managing all workplace activities.

The focus then switched to Knowledge Management, with the assumption that building knowledge portals would enable the sharing of information from the bottom up across an organization. Anecdotal evidence suggests that only single digit percentages of people add information voluntarily to these portals, as commitments to other components of their busy working lives take precedence. In addition, information overload has become a critical factor in managing workloads – and since one of the key challenges is to make it easy for employees to find exactly the information they need rather than providing them with all information that exists in a given domain, the incentive is not always there for the employee to add even more information!

More recently, we now have added many more different communication mechanisms and devices to get information to us much more quickly than before. We work in more places – not just the office, but at home, in coffee shops, in airport lounges. Technology has enabled work scenarios that we would never have thought possible but it has left us busier: we tend to work more rather than less. Work life is faster and different, but not necessarily easier. There is a growing realization that throwing additional advanced technology to help manage workplace activities is not the full solution. A busy, overworked person with a new technology can become an even busier and more overworked person!

In spite of all of these advances, Microsoft Office, first introduced in 1989, is by far the most commonly-used work and process management tool in use today. Processes are defined in email, projects are managed in Microsoft Excel, project proposals are produced in Microsoft PowerPoint, and work items are stored in Microsoft Word. However, Microsoft Office is not an information management tool and data stored in documents or email can be very difficult to report on.

In summary, the top-down approach to managing work processes, built around enterprise systems, does work in some cases, but only for a small number of top-level processes. With the bottom-up approach to knowledge management, many portals lie empty and unused. Microsoft Office is what people use to manage, define, implement and execute processes and projects – but data is locked and often lost in Microsoft Office. So there is a gap – there is a lot of good work going on in different places in organizations but the various components need to somehow be linked and glued together. Enter SharePoint!

SharePoint excels in enabling the building of quick solutions to manage simple processes. SharePoint solutions enable workplaces that connect people to people and people to information. You can build a solution that allows your customer to find, use and share data when and where they need it. It is essential however that you do not build many quick SharePoint solutions that do not talk to each other, if you want an architected workplace. You must build SharePoint solutions in an architected way, so that information is not locked and lost in your new workplace. But to do that we need to understand the way we work, the processes we are trying to mange. We need to define each of the processes we use and to examine the interactions between processes. We can then build a SharePoint solution that incorporates and works with Microsoft Office to bridge the gaps.