Keith O Hudson

From 1999 to 2010, I worked at America West Airlines (now US Airways), mostly as a contracts manager for IT contracts. For two years after the merger I did process reengineering to bring some of the pre-merger processes together. During my time at AWA/USA, I have been passionate about trying to streamline and automate business processes to the greatest extent possible, mostly using Microsoft Access. I operated on the principle that computers are powerful tools, and if a business task is capable of being performed by a computer, we shouldn’t have a human doing it.

For instance, when I joined the Contract Services Group in the IT department, I was able to make some changes to the group’s contract management database to speed up entering contracts, printing out contract profiles, and finding records. We identified areas where the computer could do more work so the work we did was speeded up.

We created a project management database to keep track of our projects, and over time enhanced it with additional features like prioritized task lists and integration with vendor contact information.

However, it is very difficult for an IT organization to support Microsoft Access.  Its complexity makes it difficult to troubleshoot when it does not function as expected.  It would take a veritable army to support Microsoft Access throughout a Fortune 1000 enterprise.

When Sharepoint was introduced into US Airways in 2009, I discovered a tool similar to Access in its capabilities, but much easier to learn, and built in a way that made it much harder to break.  Built in security, automatic email capability, electronic workflows, automatic document versioning and check-in check-out make it a business process automation dream.   I began using it to streamline as many of my processes as possible: contract tracking and renewal reminders, license tracking, training approval and tracking, and contingent staffing processes we are processes that could be handled in less time using an automated Sharepoint system.

The breadth of Sharepoint’s capabilities makes it very powerful indeed, including collaboration, portal, search, content management, business forms, business intelligence, workspaces, central management, security and storage. Its out of the box abilities are truly impressive.

So what can Sharepoint do for your company?  Wherever you have processes involving approvals, or storage of documents, or sharing of ideas, Sharepoint can probably help streamline and speed up the process.

If you already have Sharepoint in your organization, let’s look at your biggest point of pain together and see if we can devise a way to put Sharepoint to work to ease the pain.

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