Prove It: Using Analytics to Drive SharePoint Adoption and ROI - Softcover

Johnson, Loren; Handley, Susan; Van Buren, Sadalit; Buckley, Christian; Culver, Brian; Molnar, Agnes; Kapoor, Kunaal; Wagner, Kip; Burke, Gloria

9780615970967: Prove It: Using Analytics to Drive SharePoint Adoption and ROI

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0615970966 ISBN 13: 9780615970967

Publisher: Webtrends, 2014

User adoption has been one of my war cries ever since I started using SharePoint in 2006 to coordinate AIDS vaccine research data for Dr. Susan Zolla-Pazner and the CAVD (Collaboration for AIDS Vaccine Discovery). After building a system that would manage the research data, I sat with Susie to explain how the system worked. I didn’t even get a minute into the explanation, when she stopped me cold. “I don’t care how it works. Just tell me what I have to do.” That statement was a revelation that has guided my SharePoint career for the past eight years.End user engagement (user adoption by any other name) and lack of a world class analytics engine are two of the biggest shortcomings ofSharePoint. Could it be that there is a direct correlation between the two? I never considered the possibility until Abed Farhan, Vice President at Webtrends, called me and asked if I would come to Portland, Oregon and talk with his team about the SharePoint Community. We met for two days, 8 to 10 hours a day, discussing SharePoint and analytics, why it wasn’t being talked about within the community and what the real value of analytics could be when coupled with metrics around user engagement. “Prove It!” is the culmination of those talks.I came away from the meeting in Portland convinced that a major piece of the SharePoint engagement problem could be clarified through the use of analytics. I called my friends Susan Hanley and Sadie van Buren to tell them I was putting together a book to explore user engagement through analytics in SharePoint. They immediately became part of the project, so I knew we were on to something. Loren Johnson reached out to the team at BrightStarr and Unisys to get real world examples of analytics in action. Within a week, I had confirmation from Agnes Molnar, Brian Culver and Christian Buckley, reaffirming my observation that this was a topic that was ripe for exploration.What is presented here is not a roadmap or a framework, but a set of ideas on how you might implement analytics to drive user engagement. This is not just theory, however. The solutions described have been put into practice within large and small companies, as you will read about in the coming chapters. The task ahead is for you to recognize yourself and your situation within these stories and rewrite them to accomplish what you need, what your company needs, to meet their business objectives.Convincing users to use SharePoint is not a business objective. Using SharePoint will be the by-product of an analytics platform that discovers work patterns and behaviors, gradually implementing change management so that the SharePoint platform is part of a transparent solution to your business problems.

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