How well does your organization use SharePoint? You probably can’t answer that in any quantifiable terms, much less speak about how the various components of SharePoint are working for you.
With SharePoint’s explosive popularity and adoption worldwide, a community of SharePoint experts has formed with the goal of sharing knowledge about this product. The authors in this book, as well as hundreds of others, dedicate their time and energy to help organizations understand and use the product, and have made a galaxy of resources available for different areas of functionality.
What’s been missing is a cohesive way to analyze and understand the platform as a whole. Organizations don’t know what they have, and they may be focusing too much on projects that yield little return, missing the quick wins, or declining to invest in areas that could truly transform their businesses.
I created the SharePoint Maturity Model to apply a holistic view to a SharePoint implementation and to bring standardization to the conversation around functionality, best practices, and improvement. My goal is to allow organizations to reach the full potential of their investments in SharePoint, and the SharePoint Maturity Model is the framework that enables this.
My work as a SharePoint consultant, starting in 2006, gave me a perspective over many different companies and implementation types. I noticed there was a typical progression of SharePoint projects and the issues surrounding them. Most companies were working toward the same initiatives and struggling with the same challenges, though most saw their efforts as unique to their environment. Many clients hired us because we helped “other companies” solve the same problem. Other than anecdotal evidence, there was no way to truly compare organizations’ use of SharePoint.
In 2009, when Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 made SharePoint a viable platform for a broad range of companies, I expressed the trend of implementation as a quadrant of Complexity and Risk vs. Buy-in (see Figure 1-1), where companies typically started with the “low-hanging fruit” projects and saved the more culture-changing and resource-intensive projects for later.
With the release of SharePoint 2010, it was obvious that the picture was much more complex than this. A few other SharePoint experts had attempted to set out a model of SharePoint maturity, but these were limited to specific segments of the technology, such as deployment and collaboration. At this time, I was also seeing an evolution in the community’s thinking, from largely technical to more business-focused concerns. I was frustrated with the mostly tactical, technology-oriented conversations I kept hearing about SharePoint, and I had a vision for a standardized way for people to talk about their implementations and a means for them to benchmark against others and show progress over time, which is critical to justifying investments in IT.
In the Fall of 2010, I created Version 1 of the SharePoint Maturity Model and, with the support of Mark Miller, published it on EndUserSharePoint for community evaluation and feedback. The enthusiastic response it received showed there had truly been a need for this kind of tool, and suggestions from many community members have led to continuous improvements since its release. Since then, organizations of all sizes, from 20 users to 40,000 users, have assessed their progress against the Model. A selection of the current data from these assessments is available on SharePointMaturity.com.