A note from Mark Miller: Sue Hanley and I have been running into each other on the lecture circuit recently. It’s nice to have someone to bounce ideas off when it comes to developing content for the business user. Sue is an internationaly recognized authority on user adoption.

In this article, she responds to the article about a SharePoint project I’m working on with my five year old daughter. My daughter and I will be presenting the solution this Saturday at SharePoint Saturday Philly.

Guest Author: Susan Hanley
President of Susan Hanley LLC

Many years ago, when my kids were a couple years older than your daughter, I brought my two older ones to “take your kids to work day.” I designed an activity for all the kids we were hosting that day and got Lotus to donate 40 copies of Lotus Organizer.

We had the kids in a training room for part of the day and taught them how to design and configure a solution to manage their CD collection – complete with metadata for Artist, Genre, Title, etc. (This was before there were iPods, of course, so the solution might have had some value to the kids at the time. We even got an article placed about it in the Washington Post.) Basically, the goal was to show the kids a little bit about what their parents did – gather objectives from users and then design solutions to achieve those objectives. This sounds like exactly what you did with your daughter!

I think that what you really demonstrated was even more what I do when I talk about how to design an effective information architecture than about gathering objectives. For example, you might have discussed whether it would make sense to keep track of the date she you bought each book – i.e. Purchase Date – or she might have decided that it would be interesting to track the Color of each cover.

While you might imagine some one-off scenario where collecting these attributes might potentially be interesting, they are likely to be attributes with limited use over time – in other words, we really want to make sure that the attributes we expect our content owners to document are ones that address practical business scenarios.

It might be that the cost of capturing is not worth the expected benefit and that’s an important discussion to have. Since it would be virtually impossible to figure out Purchase Date for your daughter’s collection of existing books, you’d have to have a discussion about whether or not it is important to capture the value historically or only going forward – exactly what we do for real business solutions!

Either way, it’s a great way to engage your kids in the work that Dad does. Of course, since not one of my three kids is remotely interested in system design, information architecture, or any of the other things I do (except maybe travel), I wonder if it was really such a good thing to introduce them to Mommy’s work so early. You may want to think about that …. :-)

Sue

Susan Hanley, President of Susan Hanley LLC, is an expert in the design, development and implementation of successful portal solutions, with a focus on information architecture, user adoption, governance and business value metrics. She is an internationally recognized expert in knowledge management and writes a blog on SharePoint and Collaboration for Network World Magazine. Susan is the co-author of Essential SharePoint 2007 and the upcoming Essential SharePoint 2010.