At a previous job my task was to manage Anti-terrorism training products. During the course of researching I stumbled upon an article that looked at a terrorist cell and posed an interesting question of “which one in the cell would be the best person to take out?” In other words stopping which person would cause the group to disintegrate. Is it the ideologue? Is it the actual person who carries out the fatal end? Is it the accountant who funds the operation?
Oddly enough it wasn’t any of these roles. It was a sort of middle man who carried money, means and instructions from the buffers to upper end of leadership to the support people in the field cells. Ever since reading this I always keep this concept in mind.
It wasn’t until I began using and propagating SharePoint usage that I saw the true model of this theory. As it has been mentioned in many blogs and white papers, SharePoint gets pushed from the top level decision makers, through IT and onto the end user without much guidance, thought or direction. The foremost flaw is the “not understanding” how SharePoint needs to be used for the Business at hand. Usually this knowledge does not lay with executive leadership, not with IT units who deploy it, and certainly not in the end user who is too busy performing to have to worry about how to translate it to their daily routine.
Who then shuttles in between these groups? Who has the familiarly with all, yet remains objective of each. This is a person who can step all ways to gather the message of the ideal, the limits of IT operations and the environment of the executer. But what role or title do they hold?
The middle man concept somewhat works but that refers more to the settling up both parties involved and exiting once the deal has been made. Our person guides, advises, evangelizes SharePoint and business.
Where and who is this person? A project manager, the trainer, maybe a unit manager, perhaps a business analyst, or could it be a consultant?
In the next installment of this series I will go further into this SharePoint Identity Crisis.
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