By Robert Schley
I worked as a Network Administrator for many years. I joined the Marines straight out of high
school as a “small computer systems specialist" and worked for eight years setting up and
maintaining many diverse systems, ranging from straight Cisco networking to
Windows Enterprise support to WAN/LAN transmission mediums. I took for granted the amount of technology
that I was being exposed to over my enlistments. Once I left the military, I realized I needed
to choose a specific area of expertise rather than be on call for general IT
support. So, for the next four years, I
worked for four years as a Department of Defense contractor teaching
Information Technology to Marines.
At the end of my contract, I moved to Nashville, TN. After going through months of SharePoint
training and being mentored by some of the finest SharePoint instructors around,
I’m now an Instructor myself with PremierPoint Solutions,
where I continue to utilize my training skills and vast IT background
knowledge. Now that I have had
comprehensive training and experience with Microsoft’s SharePoint software
(though I'm always learning new things about it), I realize how little I knew
about SharePoint as a system administrator.
Why? Well, that’s a bit of a story.My first exposure to SharePoint was in the Marine Corps in the early 2000s. There wasn’t a huge to-do about it, so SharePoint quietly slipped into usage at the unit I was in. The IT people who set it up, and the IT people involved in sustaining it, were from different departments that didn’t always communicate with each other well.
Personally, I saw SharePoint as little more than “a web
server joined with a shared drive.” So, although I saw SharePoint, over time,
becoming integral to Marine Corps communication and information sharing, I
dismissed it as unimportant, since our department, the “real” IT department,
wasn’t responsible for it.
My last job, where SharePoint was used for collaboration and
reporting, began to wake me up to the possibility that SharePoint might be much
more than I realized – until forced and unnecessary server migrations broke the
customizations which had made it so useful in that environment.
Now I work for a company that is focused on SharePoint, and
I realize how my false preconceptions and skepticism “stunted my growth” relative
to SharePoint. One of my assumptions from a behind-the-curtain, systems/network
administration perspective was that it was such a simplistic system I didn’t
need to follow it. There couldn’t possibly
be any real power in a system that doesn’t need technical people to explain and
maintain it. The fact that the IT
Department did not run the SharePoint server when I was in the military was
"proof" of that. It never occurred
to me that there could be a very good
reason that IT was not given that responsibility.
Similar to social
networking, the power of SharePoint is the ability to hide "the man behind
the curtain." The technology behind
SharePoint is not actually that complex or anything too terribly new. In its most basic breakdown, SharePoint is
literally a web front end that connects to an SQL database to store
objects. The ambitious nature of this
is not the technology (which I’ve always been focused on), but that it is
"organizationally capable." In
other words, it works, and that is the reason SharePoint is creeping in to most
organizations. It’s likely that even
Microsoft couldn’t have foreseen how popular and pervasive it would become.
So now, having overcome my former skepticism, here I am a
former network administrator who has transitioned to training technology and
now to teaching SharePoint. (I see myself as a
teacher now rather than simply an instructor.
Teachers offer their thoughts, comments, and impressions of progress, as
well as methodology and facts.) In this
case, teaching SharePoint is much more than explaining which button to
push. It is the awareness of who needs
the information; and the “who” is different for every single implementation.
Having gone through this transition, I now see the wisdom of
taking SharePoint Information Management out of the hands of IT, because they
are outside the flow of information. The IT Department is excellent at
providing platforms to support work, but the raw effort of managing
associations, information flow, and relevance to active operations (business)
needs to be managed by the people actually doing the actions. I was a platform provider rather than a direct
information manager.
Information Technology professionals still play a vital role
in organizations. The deep knowledge and
skills required to provide platforms will never go away. But Information Managers are taking an
increasingly important role in business systems. While the ability to build an IT platform
will always be vital, the ability to utilize those systems and optimize them
for the organization is just as important.
Maybe this is just part of my own personal growth from
having “skills for the sake of skills” to learning to craft those skills to be
useful within an organization. I like to
think that I am catching up to the revolution of empowering individuals within
organizations to adapt the organizational methodology to be as efficient as
possible. Organizations are becoming
smarter through the improved communication and collaboration in
SharePoint. As Stephen Hawking put it,
“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change.”
