CIO —

There's always more CIOs can do to help the business succeed.

Regardless of what company you work for, there seems to be an unending parade of requests to integrate some new application, or develop some application for a part of the business where you can't find a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product to solve.

Like many CIOs today, despite the unending list of tasks you have been assigned, you may also be faced with a flat or shrinking budget. If you're in that enviable position, having the limited budget finding the right people is always a challenge. This begs the question: How do you improve your internal satisfaction and reduce the backlog of applications to build?

Defining the Problem

The first thing you need to realize is that your application backlog is an iceberg. What you see are only the projects that are big enough and valuable enough that they've officially made the list. Behind your official list are the applications which smaller and less significant parts of the organization need but can't get on the list because they don't meet the minimum bar. Whether you have an official minimum bar or not, most organizations have learned that some projects just aren't worth putting on the list. Consider the age of some of the requests on your backlog. In many organizations application backlogs are measured in years not months or weeks.

How Did We Get Here?

Applications make the list because the current costs represent something significant to the organization. The other reason the applications make the list is because the business can't solve the solution themselves. What would be optimal would be if the business had the tools and skills to create their own solutions.

Historically there have been tools like Microsoft (MSFT) Access which created problems when the business was allowed to create their own solutions. The problem wasn't that they were necessarily creating their own solutions, but rather that they chose a technology with issues and there wasn't enough communication for you to understand where the business was building their own. Picking a better platform to allow users to build their solutions on, and also improving the communications with the business, can effectively remove the negatives surrounding users built solutions and allow the organization to reap the benefits.

Where's Here?

Nearly every survey indicates that the market penetration for Microsoft SharePoint is huge. Microsoft research indicates that 78% of the Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint. Effectively SharePoint is available in most organizations, even if it's not an officially supported platform. So here's a platform that the organization owns but one which is also typically underutilized.

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