This is the fourth in a series of interviews with Océ, about their Enterprise 2.0 implementation and adoption experiences. Océ is a leading international provider of digital document management technology and services. Earlier, I wrote out their micro-messaging, wiki experiences, and enterprise information architecture. Prior interviews have been with Samuel Driessen, Information Architect at Océ. For this post I spoke about their SharePoint efforts with Jan van Veen, Manager Internal Communications, in Corporate Communications and Tom Dombret, the technical team lead on the SharePoint effort.

The effort began as an IT initiative when the new CIO determined that SharePoint should be the enterprise standard for collaboration in order to provide a common and more robust platform. However, it was recognized that the SharePoint implementation needed to be a combined IT and business effort to be successful. Jan mentioned that with SharePoint they were able to fill the gap between publication and collaboration. Their intranet served as the main publication platform but it had no collaboration capabilities. Their existing collaboration tool had limitations, was not intuitive, and had few users.

Jan said this was only the second project at Océ in which Corporate Communications was involved at Steering Committee level in an IT effort and he was pleased to participate. Océ had already been looking at SharePoint. They did some reference site visits to other Dutch firms that had already implemented it.  The main lessons learn was to not simply view the implementation as an IT effort, business users needed to be involved.

A small pilot had already been started at the local level when the decision was made to make SharePoint the enterprise standard.  Tom and Jan said they decided to expand this effort to the corporate level.  Jan was a pilot user as a group was set up in Corporate Communications, one of the pilot groups with not just a local scope, but a corporate scope. They began with about 10 groups and limited the total number to 15 so they could properly serve them. They wanted to be able to learn from each group’s experience and not get overwhelmed with support needs.

The purchasing department was one of the most successful pilot groups.  They first looked at their information needs before designed the site. The site then provided global access to important documents for every user, like contracts and allowed for proper version control. They made careful use of metadata. Another success factor was the elimination of all other collaboration platforms.

Océ also limited the functional scope of SharePoint to simply its collaboration capabilities. This provided more control and reduced possible confusion.  They consider this a success factor. They set up two templates: one for departments and one for projects.  They determined that departments and projects would have different needs. I would certainly agree. Groups could customize these templates but the templates provided a common starting point. This is another good move.

Océ used the out of the box SharePoint functionality. On their site visits, the other firms suggested this approach. Customization can make things overly complex and difficult if they need to do a re-install.

This implementation was done during the current economic downturn and this timing had two consequences. First, they did not immediately give all 23000 employees a license.  Potential users had to apply and provide a business reason. Tom said that this was actually a blessing as it allowed them to focus on the high potential users and properly serve the smaller number.  Second, it limited their use of outside consultants. They did use consultants for a short period of time and benefited from this.

Jan and Tom feel the implementation was successful because they proceeded slowly and carefully. They worked with each group to help them align the site with their business needs and continued to exchange ideas with users. The benefit went both ways as they learned from each group.

As I have discussed in other posts in this series, Océ is implementing a number of enterprise 2.0 tools. If a group approached them wanting a particular tool, they would first look to understand the business drivers and then pick a tool that supported these needs.  They would not automatically go with the requested tool.  They are educating users on the capabilities of each tool and this is appreciated. They are also educating users on the difference between publication and collaboration. Jan wrote a blog post on the lack of training to be a knowledge worker. Technical and manufacturing roles receive training and often have to be certified. The equivalent does not exist for knowledge workers so they are trying to fill this gap.

As they expand the number of SharePoint sites, they want each group to have a local knowledgeable user to help them. They also want to put one SharePoint site outside the firewall to collaborate with business partners such as suppliers and re-sellers.  In addition, they want to explore setting up individual sites through the MySite functionality. This should provide greater efficiency for individual information management.

They plan to move about 80% of the existing content on their intranet into more collaborative spaces such as SharePoint and their wiki.  This will give them better integration of publication and collaboration.  I think the Océ approach represents a best practice example of how to get started with SharePoint. I will be interested to learn how it continues.