From Mark Miller: When Debbie Rosen first approached me with the SharePoint50 results, I was floored. I told her the entire SharePoint Community would be interested in hearing about the research, why it was done and the final results. In this installment of The SharePoint50 Project, Debbie explains the history behind the project.

Have you ever wondered who are the most influential individuals in driving SharePoint adoption? Who are the key influencers in driving growth and knowledge in the SharePoint community? Who is driving the ideas to evolve SharePoint to be a more strategic business platform?

As two companies who have a vested interest in the expansion and success of SharePoint, Global 360 and KnowledgeLake wanted to know. We felt that if we had this knowledge it would help us decide who to partner with and where to make our investments. The question then became one of “how”.

A simple survey would be one approach. But would that really tell us everything we wanted to know? So we turned our focus to another approach: What if we could find the most influential voices in the SharePoint community and work with them?

Global 360 had been successful identifying the top 50 influencers in the business process management (BPM) market working with a company called Influencer50. As Mark mentioned in his intro article, The SharePoint50 Project: Who are the main influencers in SharePoint?, Influencer50 is a team of independent analysts who find the top influencers in select markets.

Our initial BPM project was a huge success for us as it helped to identify who our customers trusted when they were making decisions around business process improvement. Because we were seeing a lot of companies looking to leverage SharePoint as a strategic business process platform, we wanted to repeat this success for the SharePoint market. Understanding who our customers — and potential customers — look to as “trusted advisors” makes it easier for us to identify who we want to work with in a number of key areas such as our customer implementations, product strategy and SharePoint education.

By identifying who the top influencers are in the SharePoint community, we can also do our part to proliferate their good ideas and work in partnership to support their community expansion efforts. For example, we are working with several members of the community (names to be revealed in week 2 of the campaign!) on an educational series, guides and interviews around how to know if you need to use workflow or business process management (BPM).

We are also learning a lot from these individuals. What have they done to become so influential? What are the key nuggets that they have to share? It has been both a fun and invigorating experience to meet and interact with so many accomplished professionals.

KnowledgeLake and Global 360 believe in the spirit of community and that the more people with great ideas, the better. “Influencers”, by definition are people whose actions or opinions have an effect on someone else. Interacting with the top influencers in the SharePoint Community can help us identify what the “best of the best” are doing right to learn, grow and share their ideas.

While it’s only the top 50, it is a great start.

Deborah Rosen
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Global 360
Ms. Rosen joined Global 360 in 2008 bringing more than 23 years of sales, marketing, and executive management experience in the technology industry. Most recently she served as Executive Vice President of Marketing, Industry Solutions and Business Development for webMethods, Inc. Prior to joining webMethods, Ms. Rosen served as Vice President of Sales for Intelisys Electronic Commerce, where she played a key role in building the company and its sales force from the ground up. Previously, Ms. Rosen spent 10 years at Computer Associates International, where she held a number of positions, most notably as Senior Vice President of Sales.

Ms. Rosen attended Ohio State University earning a B.S. in Business Information Systems.