Are you working in an organisation that’s got the most out of its SharePoint investment?

If so, you may be in a fortunate minority – given some stark data we uncovered about the global state of play around this unquestionably feature-rich and potentially very useful platform.

Those findings were put together in a study we published last year called ‘Connecting and Optimizing SharePoint’ that summed up what over 400 AIIM members told us what their genuine assessment of the software, framed by Microsoft as an ideal collaboration and information sharing tool, was.

And what we found? That a lot are in trouble – with nearly two-thirds of enterprises saying that their SharePoint project has either stalled (26%) or isn’t meeting original corporate expectations (37%). Sorry to say that in this universe of data at least, a mere 11% of businesses say that their SharePoint project has been an unequivocal success.

What may make a lot of SharePoint sites feel worse is that it’s not the underlying tech that’s seen as ‘the reason’ for this – but other, mainly cultural or project management, factors: our respondents told us that it was failure of senior management to endorse and enforce SharePoint as number one issue, closely followed by inadequate user training and a general lack of planning, investment and expertise.

The mature response to all this has to be, surely, that we need to see change coming from the very top here. Enterprises have SharePoint, but staff are simply not engaging with this unique technology in a committed way.

Incidentally, if you have assumed that the other collaboration tool in Microsoft’s arsenal, its Yammer system, is taking up the slack here, the answer is, no: just 18% of respondents confirmed its adoption in their organisation – with only one in ten of those reporting widespread and regular use of the thing. (Four in ten say they do not use any form of business social tool whatsoever at the moment, by the way – from Microsoft or anywhere else.)

Getting SharePoint working right is way more than just IT’s job

But SharePoint remains a credible investment priority. That means we need managers – at the C-suite down, frankly – to get behind it if they want to realise any kind of a return on that investment.

To sum up, AIIM’s message to the market when it comes to SharePoint right now: to get the most from it, firms need to decide what they are using it for, commit to it and complete integration with other systems – and that’s a job not for just IT, especially not with SharePoint as it really is a choice line-of-business teams should be empowered to make.

So if you are a SharePoint user, AIIM encourages you to look down this path. And good luck!

Find out more about the analysis of the state of play of the global SharePoint market by checking out the report

By John Mancini, President of Market Intelligence firm, AIIM