Bonjour! This week I attended (and spoke at) the ITA Fall Collaborative in Montreal. It is the 10th Anniversary of the Information Technology Alliance, an alliance of IT professionals from accounting and consulting firms and the technology vendors that service the industry. In addition to many CPA firms from the U.S. and Canada, software vendors attending included Microsoft, Interwoven, CCH and Sage to name a few.

The ITA’s motto is “Knowledge Increases in Value When it is Shared”, and ITA is truly a collaborative organization. Everyone is there to share best practices on how to leverage, manage and implement technology to improve the efficiency, productivity and work-life balance in the competitive and rapidly changing professional services sector. It’s interesting to see the number of accounting firms that have adopted collaborative technology. As you’d expect, many of them are implementing SharePoint, much like our friends at Crowe Chizek who recently did a webinar with us on their experiences there.

There were several talks on SharePoint at the conference. One of the things that struck me while I listened to the war stories was the importance of the “soft” issues. All too often we IT professionals focus on the nuts and bolts of this powerful technology. But SharePoint is inherently a social platform, where people are working together to achieve a business goal. It seemed to me that the success of the SharePoint implementations that were showcased often relied on non-technical issues.

That reminded me of something. A few months back I mentioned a whitepaper by Michael Sampson of Collaboration Success Advisors entitled “SharePoint for Business: A Six Step Strategy for Achieving Collaboration Success and Improving Business with SharePoint”. Back then, I said I was going to post a review and it’s long overdue. Michael was good enough to provide me with a copy of his paper and as I re-read it on the plane home from Montreal, I realized the power of his analysis.

In my next post I’m going to go a bit deeper into that White Paper to discuss some of the interesting insights it provides.

Barry.