SharePoint's flexibility can become a curse if your organisation doesn't have a vision for how to use it. Through many assignments, we have helped leaders understand how SharePoint and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) can make a big difference.

The "virtual workplace" model shown below, is one of a number of models we use in strategy and design work. It legitimises a wide range of information needs people have that today are probably catered for in separate and unconnected ways. This results in people working harder, not smarter and increased risk, hassle and cost.

Our strategy and roadmap assignments are customised to your situation and needs. They can cover:

	Connection between business drivers and ECM	Identifying your key business drivers, issues and goals, and getting clarity on what SharePoint and other technologies can do to move you forward.
	Effectiveness of information and knowledge use today	Assessing by observation, interview and surveys, how effective your organisation is, compared to others, and what the key disablers are that need to be addressed.
	Information and knowledge vision	Forming through a workshop process your vision for the role of information and knowledge in your organisation's success.
	Strawman of future options and ways of working	Creating mockups and presentation material to socialise the ideas and choice points on what the future could look like. This effectively gets the change management process off to a great start, and helps ensure the strategy and roadmap are well grounded and practical.
	Role of the "intranet"	Intranets are often unloved and of limited value because they are disconnected from business-as-usual. Our models, examples and thinking can help put the intranet in perspective as a critical know-how and know-who tool for your organistion.
	Roadmap and budget choices	Creating a high level roadmap, with key deliverables and outcomes, as well as creating a spreadsheet with costing options.
	Assessment of current systems, roles, support structures	Using the virtual workplace model and others to identify the impact different systems, teams, processes and roles are having in how information and knowledge are managed. This lays the groundwork for changes needed.
	Self sufficiency options	Reviewing your internal SharePoint skills and comparing these with different implementation strategies. These can range from "turn-key" externally supported right through to full knowledge transfer and self sufficiency. The strategy would highlight the pros and cons of approaches.
	Infrastructure & system options	This can include what systems will form the future blueprint, and how they interact. It can also include system architecture for more complex environments (e.g. intranet, internet, extranet sharing of common content). Previous work has also included a review of private cloud, local cloud and Office 365.
	Governance options	What roles, policies and measures are needed to manage the implementation at technical, information architecture, support, training and business-as-usual usage levels.
	Change Management	SharePoint may well be easier to use than other technologies, but that doesn't mean users will flock to it! The strategy and roadmap can use our proven behaviour change models to form a communication, training, monitoring and enforcement framework suited to your culture
	Recordkeeping	The strategy can be underpinned by compliance and business risk drivers. Often while "recordkeeping" may be seen as an "extra" we have to do, good retention and disposal of content can aid findability of key know-how and business critical documents, while removing the less important content (and saving storage costs) on a regular basis