So, for the past year or so I have been heading up a
SharePoint implementation project within Jisc.
It has proved a very interesting task and has got me thinking in all
sorts of directions. It has also been an
extremely useful opportunity to refresh whatever professional skills and
knowledge I may have and to reacquaint myself with life at the sharp end of
records and information management.
As some of you will know, a recurring area of interest of
mine for some time has been the shifting foci of power that we have witnessed
in recent years when it comes to information creation and control: away from
the organisation and towards the user and what, if anything, our professional
response should be.
SharePoint, it appears to me, sits at an interesting point
along this continuum. Or, more
interestingly still, can potentially be made to sit at pretty much any point
along it from ‘bolted down corporate repository’ (mandatory metadata, records
declaration and retention management etc) to ‘free and easy user-focused
solution’ (create a Team site, store content, share it with who you like). It is this range of potential management,
control and usage options that interests me as I suspect it is pretty unique
within this landscape. After all, if you
let all your users loose with Dropbox or Googledocs, you are always going to be
limited in the range of centrally defined management controls that you can put
in place across it. Alternatively it
would be difficult to try to turn a full blown EDRMS into a collaborative tool
which is entirely at the user’s discretion when it comes to information
creation and management.
So the benefit, in theory at least, of SharePoint is that it
does at least give you as the information manager the potential to find your
own ‘sweet spot’ on this ‘continuum of control’: to decide which elements you
want to enforce and which you wish to leave to the user’s discretion; to
determine how much information management policy and rigour you wish to
implement, and how much you want to leave to individual whim. Finding exactly where this sweet spot is for
your organisation is, it seems to me, half the key to success when it comes to
implementing SharePoint: enforce too much control and you may find it a near
impossible feat to convince your users that they should abandon their
GoogleDocs accounts for it; but include too little and you may find you are
simply replacing one unmanaged and ungoverned mess of information with
another.
And, of course, if our experience is anything to go by, you
are likely to discover different sweet spots exist from department and
department and function and function within
your organisation with some users demanding a level of rigour and
governance that others would find totally off putting. Trying to be ‘all things to all men’ may seem
like a tall order, and perhaps it is from a practical perspective but at least
it is theoretically possible within SharePoint.
Yesterday I took part in a UCISA Webinar that explored some
of these themes and which explained a little about the decisions that we have
taken here at Jisc with regards to managing information and records within
SharePoint. I started with a brief(ish)overview of some of the history that has shaped the interplay between user andorganisation with regards to the management of information and a copy of the
script for this is available. I also
gave a presentation which explored how we have approached SharePoint withinJisc, and in particular how we have implemented the types of records management
controls that we consider appropriate for our needs. The whole Webinar is also available for
downloading (1.5 hours) if interested and which not only includes the above with narration,
but also a presentation on University of Highlands and Island’s experience of using SharePoint and all the
questions and discussions surrounding the presentations.
Now that I have got the blogging bit between my teeth again I’ll
perhaps elaborate a little more on the approach we have taken in future posts
in the near future but think this is probably enough to be getting on with for
now…
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