Why You Should Consider SharePoint Workflow

I was pretty surprised recently while giving a SharePoint presentation at a San Francisco conference.  Of the 60 attendees, only four used Workflow in SharePoint. My comment back to the audience was this: How can you have collaboration (which is what SharePoint is for) if you don’t have workflow? Most nodded their head in agreement.

This exchange got me to thinking…why are so few people leveraging business process automation in SharePoint. Here are some thoughts:

• They don’t understand the process. A SharePoint deployment is typically managed by the IT staff. The IT staff may not know the first thing about the document approval process, the employee review process, the new employee hire process and so on. If you don’t understand a process, you can’t automate it.
• Not enough time. Once again the IT staff is tasked with many things and interviewing process participants and building these complex processes just doesn’t make the list.
• The current process is not ideal. Maybe you do know your process. Maybe you know your process inside and out. But maybe the process leaves a lot to be desired. You think, why automate a bad process? That will just allow us to get more bad things done a lot faster.
• You don’t have the necessary tools. SharePoint gives you templates, SharePoint Designer and Visual Studio as options for creating workflows. Each tool has its pros and cons, but in many cases none of these tools will allow a process owner (i.e. non-IT guy or gal) to create complex business processes. Check-out ShareVis for additional information on solving this issue.

It’s unfortunate that these and similar issues prevent the roll out of SharePoint workflow. As I said at the outset, you can’t have true collaboration without workflow – after all, everything you do is part of some business process. I would encourage you to figure out why you are not using SharePoint workflow and then work to correct the issues.

Written by Derek Neiding of Razorleaf Corporation