Keith O Hudson

In May 2008, Shane Young wrote a blog on The Sharepoint Farmer’s Almanac asking this very question.  (You can read it at http://tinyurl.com/GoodConsultant)  He points out the importance of the “soft side” of Sharepoint – things like usability, design, taxonomy, business analysis, user adoption, and discovery. Then comes his rant:

“<RANT> Now here comes the part that annoys me the most. If you don’t know most everything SharePoint can do out of box then don’t speak to another customer until you do! Seriously! I can’t tell you what percentage of my business is cleaning up other so called “consultants” but it is a big part. People who walk in the door with their army of .NET developers and start building the functionality the customer is asking for. This would be great except for one small detail. 9 times out of 10 what they are building is already included out of the box. Do you know how many times I see things that are the content query web part recreated? Or they wrote custom navigation because they couldn’t figure out how to use the one that comes with SharePoint? It drives me bonkers. They hard wire in these things and then guess what? You can’t upgrade later or the latest service pack breaks something. Why? Because that is your punishment for reinventing the wheel. This may be a great model for the consulting company but really sucks for the customer footing the bill for the never ending cycle of maintenance. </RANT> “

In short, many Sharepoint consultants don’t know Sharepoint’s full feature set well enough to serve their clients interests rather than their own. One cannot be a good Sharepoint consultant without knowing Sharepoint well enough to use its out of the box capabilities to the fullest before customizing it, and even then, the customization should be done in a way that is sustainable without a consultant going forward if at all possible.  Based on the comments to Shane’s post, there are lots of people out there who know Sharepoint well who agree with Shane.

I would go one step further.  A GREAT Sharepoint consultant not only maximizes the power of Sharepoint out of the box, but also engages in knowledge transfer so that the client’s business users are able to build their own solutions after the consultant leaves.

As a business user who has spent 11 years automating my own business processes (mostly in Access), I know the power of owning your own destiny, of being able to enhance a solution on the fly to save future time and effort.  Sharepoint makes it possible for non-programmers to become owners of their own automated processes, and gives them the ability to tweak them and adapt them quickly to changing business needs.  I think very few companies or Sharepoint consultants understand the true power of Sharepoint as a tool for business end users.

The continual stream of job postings I see for Sharepoint developers with Dot Net and other programming experience tells me that in the two years since Shane wrote his post, virtually no one has really tapped into the true power of Sharepoint yet. If they had, we would be seeing a stream of postings for Sharepoint Solution Specialists: non-programmers who can analyze and re-engineer a business process and design a Sharepoint solution using nothing but Sharepoint’s out of the box capabilities and Sharepoint Designer (plus Infopath forms ONLY if the Sharepoint installation is MOSS Enterprise).

I believe that those companies that catch the vision of Sharepoint as a tool to empower end users to automate their own processes without programmers, and who provide those end users with sufficient training and support so that they can follow good governance practices and good design principles will gain a competitive advantage in their industries

To your prosperity,

Keith O. Hudson