Organizations looking for ways to get more from their investment in SharePoint 2013 have plenty of options to explore. Some might benefit from integrating Yammer for social media, while others should consider improving search functionality or implementing more robust document management. Which projects deliver the best return-on-investment (ROI) depends on your industry and individual business needs.
From an investment standpoint, four areas of deserve special consideration: employee self-service, enterprise collaboration, customer extranet and platform integration. Here’s a closer look at each of these areas.
- Employee self-service: Investing in training and infrastructure that support employee self-service offers good ROI in that it improves productivity and engagement. To facilitate this self-service in internal communication, a company needs an extremely user-friendly corporate intranet that includes workflow and communication tools like blogs and videos.
- Enterprise collaboration: When investing in collaboration initiatives, it’s important to tailor these projects to the organization’s needs and the roles of the different people within it. The goal is to inform and empower workers by streamlining key job functions, including communication, newsfeeds, document collaboration, co-authoring and rich metadata. This requires creating an information architecture that’s specific to your organization and using tagging to provide additional context that facilitates the company’s day-to-day work.
- Customer extranet: Investing in a strong customer-facing presence improves the customer experience by providing self-service components as well as more responsive communication and resolution of issues. The general idea is to create a better customer experience and (hopefully) reduce workloads in key areas by offering more self-service opportunities.
A services company, for example, might manage projects that have a series of deliveries in the form of documents. In the old model, it would produce these documents, email them to five people inside the customer site, and then collect and reconcile multiple sign-offs on these documents. Investing in a customer extranet allows you to create a single place for your document repositories, with built-in workflows that streamline the sign-off approval process. The extranet could also incorporate project status reports, invoices and communication tools. - Platform integration: Another area that offers significant ROI is adopting cloud deployments of a SharePoint 2013 environment within Microsoft Office 365. Using a single integrated platform across the Microsoft productivity suite may offer significant cost savings on infrastructure and IT support, as well as additional capabilities.
While the ROI for SharePoint 2013 projects vary for different businesses, the four areas highlighted above present exciting opportunities for growth.
Are you ready to get more out of your investment in SharePoint 2013? Learn how Portal Solutions is able to help your organization make informed decisions.
