Mark, the Intranet Manager at BT in the United Kingdom, says that it’s how you use SharePoint 2010 that decides the value it brings:

“My post on ‘Measuring the value SharePoint 2010 can bring to your organisation’ caused a few comments, for example, Stephen Arnold posted ‘SharePoint: The new black?‘ and an intranet professional said ’I’m struggling to find the value I expected, at least obvious enough to sell to management’.

The real lesson you must learn is IT IS HOW YOUR ORGANISATION USES SP2010 THAT WILL DECIDE WHAT VALUE IT BRINGS.

Like any other technology SP2010 can do lots of things well, or not so well. That’s mainly down to how you implement, manage and use it.

As part of your SP2010 strategy you need to get the governance right for your organisation – restricted if you are highly regulated, looser if you are creative and innovative – for publishing and for accessing and using the information.“

Mark also offers a 9-item list on the role description for a Site Collection Administrator.

My Comments
1. Agreed. What you do with SharePoint – the problems, opportunities, needs you target – will make a huge difference on the perception (and reality) of value and business return. Do boring things – “SharePoint is the new file server” – and get boring results. Do more interesting things, and potentially get more interesting results.

2. My book, SharePoint Roadmap for Collaboration talks about this in Chapter 2. And if you attend the public seminar, you’ll hear it there too.

3. Mark’s one of the people at the leading edge of making SharePoint 2010 work in extremely large organizations. If you don’t subscribe to his blog, you should.