

Decision makers fear their employees will catch them clueless. - nate
http://blog.inklingmarkets.com/2010/01/decisions-are-too-often-made-in-secret.html

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Zak
This seems to be a very common problem with management types; a fear that if
managers show any uncertainty, employees won't respect them.

This sort of thing _always_ backfires. Eventually, management will make a
decision that seems wrong to the employees and is proven wrong later. The
managers then appear doubly clueless; not only were they too clueless to make
the right decision, but they were too clueless to consult the people who
weren't.

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samstokes
+1 for "Sharepoint is a wiki", even though that wasn't the main topic of the
article.

I've known for ages some things that Sharepoint _does_ , but I've never been
able to wrap my head around what it _is_ (what's the unifying theme, what's
the boundary between Sharepoint and other systems it integrates with, etc).

People and websites tend to call it a "platform for leveraging organisational
collaboration" or something equally content-free. Wikipedia calls it "a
collection of products and software elements that includes, among a growing
selection of components, ..."

Saying "it's a big clever wiki with bells on" seems like a better starting
point.

~~~
jodrellblank
It's a step up from ASP.Net/Django and a step down and sideways from
Mediawiki/Wordpress.

It's possibly closest to Joomla as a kind of let-the-end-users-build-it-
themselves CMS. That is, it has bits like 'wiki', 'web page', 'document
store', 'site', 'list' and users and groups running through it, so you can
give each department/manager/person varying levels of access including being
able to build their own intranet, LEGO style.

That is, some people get read access, some can add and edit list items, some
can edit the template for list items, some can create new lists, some can
create new sites.

You get a very uniform site which is still tailored on a per-team or per-
department basis, but without needing people who know web development. But if
you have people who know about Sharepoint development you can also add your
own custom 'lego brick' components to integrate with your other systems.

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alanthonyc
Very on point. What's more about Sharepoint: even companies that use it (like
my current client) don't have the culture to use it effectively. The top-down
approach is very much ingrained in the culture of large corporations. Unless
this fundamental point is addressed, things aren't going to change. Corporate
bureaucracies are _designed_ as hierarchies.

