Susan Hanley is talking about successful portals, and will be talking about SharePoint, but with more general principles too. See Susan’s web site.

Agenda:
– Introduction
– Key elements of successful solutions
– Summary

Introduction
Why is a portal so different?
– you can’t mandate the use of a new collaboration system — there is always another option.
– users have to understand the benefits for them — not the team, not the organization.
– you may need to jump start with incentives.
– incorporate personal preference measures to ensure that the importance of the new solution is demonstrated in more than a newsletter and an enthusiastic project team.

Key ideas:
– identify your stakeholders, eg, executives, grass roots workers, middle managers. Remember that some stakeholders don’t work for your organization, eg, partners and customers.
– understand their business objectives. If you don’t know the business objectives, you can’t measure the value.
– understand how your solution fits in a Web 2.0 world
– identify how success will be measured
– prepare a governance plan. Eg, what happens in a highly networked world when value is delivered by a group of separate companies?
– define procedures for content managements
– plan roll-out and launch

Some ideas:
– Susan sees a big lack of information literacy in many organizations. Eg, the person who was chosen to do lead SharePoint, but didn’t know how to copy and paste a URL.
– … eg, how to ask a good question; how to do research; are people comfortable using technology?
– the best training approach is to hand out little pieces of training as required.
– learning styles are a big challenge. Have to provide multiple types of training to different groups.
– hears “We need Facebook for the enterprise” quite often. Her sense is that they really want expertise location. Go look at My Profile in SharePoint. And if you need more, go look at NewsGator Social Sites.
– start My Site with a soft launch … make it available, but don’t do a lot of training.