Communication and collaboration key to Telstra’s SharePoint success

Telstra has transferred its knowledge base and intranet to SharePoint, forming partnerships between the often segregated IT and business departments of the business.

General Manager of collaboration, knowledge and intelligence at Telstra, Jason Sharpe, who shared the company’s journey from iStore to iStore 2 at this week’s SharePoint conference in Sydney, said collaboration was vital.

“This is definitely a business IT partnership; it’s not a competition. We took a look at strategic processes and tried to infiltrate processes throughout the business,” Sharpe said.

Sharpe said aligning himself with the right specialists and developing a roadmap were vital to the project’s success.

“In 2008, I came on board and was asked to do something about this and I built a strategy and a roadmap and was told ‘Jason, make it happen’,” Sharpe said.

“I realised then if you can’t know it all, find someone who does.”

While many elements of the SharePoint project have been successful with staff, Sharpe admitted the uptake of blogging tools and Web 2.0 by staff was low.

“Blogging didn’t work because it didn’t provide a safe environment for knowledge sharing. It wasn’t a good environment for Telstra to go and debate things,” he said.

Sharpe hopes all Telstra’s platforms will be on SharePoint by the end of 2011 and said the team is still learning about different aspects of collaboration, despite being more than a year and a half into the project.

“There are even more lessons to be learnt later in the journey,” he said.

Telstra CEO, David Thodey, spoke last month about Telstra’s involvement in the mobile broadband revolution