Ryan McCutchen

When rolling out a portal product to the enterprise, it is so easy for us IT types to drool over all the latest features that a product like MOSS provides. Architects, developers, or whatever usually can look at a set of features - immediately understand it and the potential it can have to the business. When we look at a feature set like the one MOSS provides out of the box it can be overwhelming to think of all the different possibilities - both OOB and from a custom development perspective. But how do you relay that to your business community. So many of us IT folks have such a difficult time being able to think like a non-technical person. We tend to think that by rolling these features out the business, that they will have the same vision of it's potential, flock to it, and revel in all its glory. But that is usually not the case in most environments. Especially those where IT doesn't have a large presence to the overall business strategy. Many IT folks will assume that everyone knows what blogs are, or social networking, IM, etc. But maybe those people never got a call from their Mom needing to fix her computer because she somehow jammed a floppy disk into the CD ROM drive (true story).

Obviously the success on a portal deployment will heavily depend on communication and evangelizing your portal vision from a functional and technical perspective. But who should do that? IT? I know that personally, I have a hard time relaying technical stuff to non-technical people. We techies have a tendency to leave your average business user in a near comatose state as we blaze through all the sexy things that our applications can do. OK....so lets train them right. We'll sit our users down for a 3 day dive into our product. Which is all good and well from an IT project checklist perspective, but the users are walking away with about 5 - 10% understanding of the material that was covered. They will go back to their daily jobs without a second thought to your life changing portal. And then they will someday need to interface with your product as part of their job.....and that's when they call the help desk.

So how do you keep from helping that same old admin post a document for the 10th time? You pass that skill on to key users in your organization - Business Subject Matter Experts. However, this can be difficult given your SMEs will most likely not be techies either. Usually where this goes south is when people are assigned this duty. As part of a project, IT will tell the business to assign a SME within their division. Management will hand this honor down to some poor schlub who will have to take this on as a recreational activity on top of their daily job. So basically this will just create a level of abstraction between IT and the business. So now a user is calling the help desk on behalf of another user. SMEs in the business need support from their management - If management is not supporting these people then it will die on the vine. That's half the battle - the other is that your SMEs actually need to want the job. They need a passion for your product. This is hard to find - it is the Bigfoot of business users. To do this you need to seek out the passion. Look for glimmers of this passion in a business user and capitalize on it. You know you've seen it - Those users who call five times a day with questions....and are ecstatic when they get their issue solved. The users who ask you to recommend a good book for the product. The user who starts asking you when the next version is coming out. When you see this type of behavior, you may have a potential SME on your hands....and if this person is willing to sign up for the job then it is your job to turn this seed into a beautiful flower. Focus on these types of SMEs and your phone will ring less and less. This type of passion for a portal or application distributed to key users in the business will allow your strategic vision to be better realized. Information workers don't want a 10 paragraph email explaining a feature set, or even a long drawn out training class. They want someone 2 cubes down from them who they can ping whenever they hit a wall. With this grass roots or guerilla type training - end users will pick up features at a much quicker rate. Which of course is the lynchpin of any portal project - It can be the greatest technical masterpiece known to man, but will fail without user adoption.