SharePoint – The Creative Business User
With the European release of the Office system suite on December 5th 2006 I was very privileged to be asked to attend the Microsoft release conference at the QEII centre in London along with 200 leading business executives from many business sectors. I was even more privileged to listen to some extremely inspiring presentations and one in particular struck a real chord with me regarding the creativity of workforces.
The business leaders were asked to rate themselves in terms of intelligence ranging from 1 to 10. The vast majority of non-shy attendees rated themselves between 7 and 9. The same audience was then asked to rate themselves using the same scale in terms of creativity. Almost no attendee viewed themselves as creative. The point was made by the speaker that people generally view creativity in terms of finger painting, tie-dyed tee-shirts and FE art teachers.
The truth is that it is impossible to be intelligent without also being creative. Creativity is not about painting pictures and making clay pots, but more about creative thinking. The most valuable asset any company has it its workforce, without exception. The people employed on a daily basis have imagination, rational thinking, they know what works and what doesn’t, they know administrative nightmares at a thousand paces, they know stifling routines when they see them, they know what would work and what would make the business they commit to, far better than now, Workforces, especially in the current climate, have a vested interest in the success of their company and they are often not shy in putting in the extra effort and hours to ensure that their company does as well as possible.
Let us not forget that if we look at the top three global leading companies in the mid 1990’s and then see where they sit today and we find them surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) languishing in position 300 or 400 today. Trends and fashions and products change over years but far too many companies take the view that they are there forever, their position in a business sector is guaranteed and that they are a safe business with a solid customer base.
We only need to look at the last 4 years of banking mayhem to realise how quickly things can change. We only need to look at the growth of internet business models and advertising in the last decade to see how retail sectors have a need to adapt quickly to change. Of course the public sector tends to take a view that they are going to be safe, whatever happens and yet look at the transformation in Higher Education in the UK over the last few years with student costs increasing, the introduction of student fees and HEFCE requests for refunds from some Universities to realise that life doesn’t stand still, and business certainly doesn’t.
Companies face a natural battle with evolution and subsequent transformation. The flavour of the last few years has been the subject of ‘business transformation’ and this is now being superseded by ‘business intelligence’. These are phrases banded about carelessly when in fact careful consideration as to their value and what the true meaning really is to a business prior to making a major investment. What is certain is that technology alone won’t save a business from recession, but technology can and does critically underpin the desire to move forward and adapt its business model for changing times. But this cannot be done without creative thinking.
So back to creativity, what’s this got to do with it all? I sat in a session recently where a comment was made that a client doesn’t wish its staff to be creative. In fact that is exactly what you do want your staff base to be because therein lies the future success of the company.
Your staff know how to make things better, they have ideas, they have thoughts, they have concepts on the ‘ground’ which often never reach the starry heights of the executive board and it is this that needs to be harnessed. What a product like SharePoint does is harness that creativity and place it within a business context that reaches the ears and eyes of those who may have missed it before.
The collaborative aspects of SharePoint uniquely concentrate and focus business audiences to become effective groups of creative thinkers working together on a unified aim or aims and solving business problems. Team sites facilitate group working where ideas emerge and new processes are enabled. Why don’t we try it this way instead of that, why don’t we now use this central list instead of silo based lists, why don’t we use this discussion forum to solve this issue. The abilities of SharePoint to underpin creative business thinking are endless.
But there is another point I would like to make and this is in terms of collaboration and discussion. Every business has its own view on what collaboration and discussion really means and often the workforce are a long way ahead of the executive in this. Perhaps it is because naturally the ‘lower’ levels of a workforce are often younger and are of a different generation, able to harness quickly the newer technologies for quick functional wins than the older executives who still have PA’s reading their emails for them. The point is not a criticism of busy executives but one of engaging with new technologies for creative business thinking. If you are going to move into a collaborative arena with SharePoint then understand that the entire team should be placing announcements in a team site, that discussion forums are for discussions and should be encouraged, that blogs are there to capture the thoughts of the workforce and that the ideas generated out of these tools should be captured and harnessed.
For too long staff have done their creative thinking in hidden silos, in the bars after work, in private email, across the water cooler or outside having a cigarette with a colleague when in fact their creative thinking will be critical to the success of every business in the years to come. Rather than stifling creative thinking within an organisation, companies owe it to themselves to use SharePoint as a base to encourage and harness creativity of staff through discussion, collaboration, new solution ideas using the SharePoint platform and so on. Don’t worry about what users do within their My Sites, you cannot see it and you still have employment governance. Do not worry that a few rogue individuals may place something in a blog that you don’t agree with – we still live in a democracy. Do not worry that someone has added a reply in a discussion that provokes a different view of thinking – these are all parts of engaging the workforce effectively with the SharePoint feature set and instead harness these inputs and use them positively.
Your creative workforce will be liberated through SharePoint and its ability to provide dynamic collaborative environments. And for those companies that stubbornly refuse to accept such ideas, let us hope that you are still in the same position a decade from now, but take a look around you at what your competitors are doing whilst you sit tight.
