Menu
How to Build a Business Case For SharePoint

How to Build a Business Case For SharePoint

A business case without a well-framed model of costs will not pass the proverbial sniff test

Risk Mitigation

The third section of a SharePoint business case describes the risks a company will mitigate by using the product. Specifically, SharePoint serves as a redundant repository for storing electronic renditions of documents, so companies often use it as part of their disaster recovery strategies. If your company is concerned about disaster recovery and business continuity, you might be able to amortize a portion of the system's costs over the probability period--the time during which a catastrophe may be likely.

Additionally, because SharePoint is widely used around the world, there's a readily available pool of resources who can support it. In this regard, SharePoint reduces some IT staffing risk.

SharePoint's Functionality SharePoint's vast functionality--which is enhanced by add-on products from Microsoft partners--has played an important role in many purchasing decisions. Indeed, organizations regularly employ SharePoint as a web content management system, for collaboration, records management, and for its advanced search capabilities. They use one product for multiple purposes, rather than having to purchase multiple products to satisfy their various functional requirements.

That's the point you want to make in your business case: By leveraging SharePoint and add-ons from Microsoft partners, your enterprise will be able to do more with less. You'll save money because you'll be licensing fewer products, and because you're licensing fewer products, your software maintenance costs will also be lower. Additionally, if your organization is already a Microsoft shop, you may be able to save even more money by aggregating all of your Microsoft product licensing and software maintenance (Software Assurance) purchases under one software license agreement.

Your business case for SharePoint should also explicitly state the key capabilities that the system offers and how those capabilities will reduce application development and on-going maintenance costs.

For example, SharePoint's extensive functionality allowed global nonprofit Conservation International to substantially reduce the time and cost to deploy a website. "We attempted to build a complex system without SharePoint, and the process took two developers three years," says Alexandre Dinnouti, Conservation International's director of web applications. "Ultimately, we realized that we would never finish the project. We redirected the resources to utilize SharePoint 2007, and we had the first version of the system ready in just under six months."

Broad Adoption

As SharePoint adoption continues, it has become almost as critical as e-mail to an organization's daily business functions. Your business case should point out that because users are familiar with the product, business requirements analysis and migrations will take less time than typical software deployments and training costs will also be mitigated. Arguably, you could recognize these cost and time savings in the discussions of hard and soft ROI, but I recommend that you call them out separately because quantifying the specific cost reductions associated with user adoption may be challenging.

At Analog Devices, a global manufacturer of semiconductors, training costs were mitigated because users largely adopted SharePoint on their own. Says CIO Peter Forte: "SharePoint has seen tremendous growth with Analog, and this has come about primarily as a result of grass roots initiatives to leverage the technology that user communities took upon."

Forte adds that because users took an active interest in leveraging SharePoint, they became more proficient with it and needed less support from IT. Even though they needed less support from IT, they ended up collaborating with IT more effectively. These factors are difficult to quantify into a hard or soft ROI, but they are worth noting in a business case.

Final Points

Once you've drafted your business case, prepare a summary document that touches on the hard ROI, soft ROI, risks mitigated, features and user adoption. Your summary document should also point out the key risks and assumptions you used to prepare the business case.

In the sections on hard and soft ROI, consider introducing three distinct estimates: conservative savings, aggressive savings and a moderated or balanced scenario. Plan conservatively and make sure that you have your supporting details in order.

Your business case should also address change management. Regardless of SharePoint's ease-of-use and broad user adoption, it still represents a change for users, and if that change isn't addressed in the business case, the system may not introduce the expected value.

Finally, the business case should emphasize that SharePoint will be deployed in a stepped and controlled fashion. Following these recommendations will enable you to develop a strong business case for SharePoint and a sound foundation for your implementation.

Russ Edelman is president of Corridor Consulting, which specializes in the design, development and deployment mission critical SharePoint solutions for Fortune 5,000 organizations. Corridor is also the co-founder of www.SharePointGovernance.Org, a free site for organizations wishing to share the good, bad and ugly of SharePoint Governance issues.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

Join the newsletter!

Or

Sign up to gain exclusive access to email subscriptions, event invitations, competitions, giveaways, and much more.

Membership is free, and your security and privacy remain protected. View our privacy policy before signing up.

Error: Please check your email address.

Tags MicrosoftroiSharepointmicrosoft sharepointthe business case

More about Analog DevicesMicrosoft

Show Comments
[]