Ensuring portal project success
This morning finds me in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at a 3-day seminar with the above title. While flying here I was reading some German management literature arguing that successful organizations all transform into "Single Purpose Tools" focusing on fewer and fewer things. The author made the parallel to famous people, who typically focus on just one thing. It suddenly struck me that in our marketplace we formerly had one such a tool -- an important one. It was the popular SharePoint 2003, frowned upon by competing vendors for lacking features, but much welcomed by customers, if seat licenses are any measure. In its new release from Microsoft the expanded SharePoint 2007 tries to tackle many different enterprise challenges. Time will tell whether traditional management theories also apply to our market. Software tools are surely critical to ensuring portal project success, but remember that you still have to do most of the hard work yourself. Fellow analyst Lisa Welchman would say that strategy and governance might be a good place to start.