SharePoint: Excel Long-Tail Knowledge Management

In these uncertain times, push systems for knowledge sharing and management are giving less results than before due to the limited planning visibility into the future - it is just becoming too hard to provide the users with the tools they need before they need it. The knowledge workers have turned to pull systems to create situational software solutions to assist in solving their business problems. Excel has always been business user's favorite tool for capturing situational solutions and managing their personal knowledge. Excel has become the most successful long-tail client in the enterprise.

For businesses to be successful, they must now cater for rapid innovation through collaborative knowledge sharing pull systems, known as Enterprise 2.0 systems (E2). Thus, having knowledge locked into personal Excel worksheets on peoples disks pose a threat to learning and innovation across a company. The same can be said about any knowledge that is not shared and findable, typically locked down by ultra traditional policies such as "need to know basis" applying by default strict access control.

Companies want to unlock all this intrinsic knowledge by using collaboration platforms, and of these SharePoint is what most organizations decide to implement (adoption rate between 55% and 80%).

So business users now face a challenge on how to move their Excel solutions into the E2 sharing and collaboration platforms. Most of them even want to enable shared information entry into worksheets, so they welcome SharePoint as the data capture tool. But how to provide the rich knowledge visualization of Excel on the web? Enter MOSS Excel Services. I recommend reading the Introduction to Excel Services and Excel Web Access article for a good introduction to ES/EWA. Also read Business Intelligence with SharePoint and Excel on TechNet Magazine for an analysis of some usage scenarios.

It might all seem simple at this point, but there are some limitations with Excel Services and multiple other options for re-implementing Excel client-side solutions functionally on the SharePoint platform. Add to the picture VBA macro infested Excel workbooks, and there is no simple migration path. In addition, the choices you make can exclude the business "super users" from being able to create situational solutions - hindering the Web 2.0 (W2) style flexibility that you aimed to provide in the first place.

A SharePoint roadmap for Excel long-tail workbooks is needed, and that is the scope of my next post.

SharePoint Governance Guidelines

The SharePoint Products and Technologies governance checklist guide on the Technet SharePoint Governance Resource Center is very popular among our customers. It covers aspects from architectural planning, roles and policies, to operational practices.

To complement this official checklist, I've collected some more concrete guidelines that my customers often request when getting started with MOSS. It covers additional aspects such as driving findability and user lifecycle management. The guidelines are available here: MOSS governance guidelines.pdf

If you have any suggestions for more recommended governance practices, please leave a comment.

[UPDATE] See the updated governance guidelines here, including new SharePoint 2010 aspects.

Emergent vs Deliberate, Push vs Pull

The Web 2.0 "Emergent vs Deliberate" struggle for control is not new, the discussions are at least a couple of years old. However, it is still very applicable inside the enterprise due to the lack of Web 2.0 features in business applications. Add to this that Information Architects - strongly supported by document and records management experts, prefer controlled vocabularies over social freeform tagging for knowledge management. Imagine del.icio.us enforcing a centrally controlled taxonomy, instead of just suggesting tags to users based on the wisdom of crowds. The suggested tags are emergent, their quality driven by all del.icio.us users that have tagged the resources.


The "Push vs Pull Systems" by John Hagel is a broader model that describes the transition from centrally decided and pushed tools and applications into a decentralized pull-based model where users themselves find and combine software to solve the business problem at hand. Companies will want to try to harvest the benefits of the freeform, emergent social collaboration tools, while being able to govern these tools and processes. The problem is that most business applications today are not designed to combine "deliberate" with the "pull model". As stated by Dion Hinchcliffe:

"The challenge will be learning how to apply these new models effectively to business while not strangling them with the traditional aspects of enterprise software that can greatly limit their potential and have led to poor outcomes and excessive structure in the past."

Typically, a central business development unit supported by a well-known management consulting company will decide on SharePoint for collaboration and management of knowledge and then use the push-model to drive the adoption across the company. I've seen this strategy in practice lately, and I can tell you that it takes a lot of effort to deliver something close to a "consumer web" experience. This combination of SharePoint, deliberate and push-model to enable Enterprise 2.0 poses several challenges as described in "Sharepoint and Enterprise 2.0: The good, the bad, and the ugly". Compare this approach with Excel, the most successful long-tail application ever inside enterprises, that empowers business users to create self-service situational software solutions.

You need to relax the idea of central command-and-control taxonomy and governance if you’re to leverage emergence in the information and people ecosystem of your company, partners and customers. What's more important? To enble users to solve business problems or to enable them to store gold-standard records of those problems?

Enterprise 2.0 Zen: Emergent Crystalization of Quality

I am a huge fan of the book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" which looks into the metaphysics of quality. A central part of this is "crystalization" driven by quality, you have to have a sense of what's good and what's not. Crystalization separates useful from meaningless in perceived information, it applies quality.

The elevator pitch of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is freeform, emergent, social collaboration that draws on our collective intelligence to solve business problems. So what exactly is "emergent"?

The idea behind the notion of emergence is simple:

Individual agents, self motivated and operating according to simple rules, can suddenly produce patterns. In certain circumstances, these patterns can evolve into behavior that is intelligent.

Emergence is what happens when the whole is smarter than the sum of its parts.

[Emergence: the connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software by Steven Johnson]

It is micro-rules leading to adaptive macro-behavior. So emergence is like crystalization, it can produce patterns based on standards for interaction that may lead to good results - it is collective quality if you like.