Frequently evaluating your company’s collaboration maturity is a great way to determine where knowledge gaps exist, what facets require additional education and how to assist people to expand their use of SharePoint. Departments will not mature at the same rate of speed, so it’s beneficial to build a model of maturity for your organisation so that you can plan the steps to take to move each department or group to the next level of collaboration maturity. 

You may choose to modify my simple maturity model below or build one of your own. The goal will be to make certain that you include some ‘stretch goals’ within each level of your maturity model to help people move to greater use of the platform.

In this model, Level One maturity is the most basic level of SharePoint use while Level Five maturity represents a department or group that is especially well skilled in the use of SharePoint to solve their business challenges.

Level One – Document Storage

Level One in the maturity model denotes that SharePoint is being used simply as a storage location for documents and other information. At this level, we’re using SharePoint to store documents that were previously located on a network drive or stored in some other document management system. There may be some unique SharePoint list creation that is allowing us to manage tasks, team calendars, project timelines, project status, or socialise other excel-like information.

The information stored on SharePoint within a Level One department is not presented as the ‘single version of the truth’, so people are skeptical of its validity and value, however, they appreciate the effort that it took for someone to publish the information onto the SharePoint portal. The primary benefit we’re deriving within a Level One environment is that documents are beginning to be stored in one location and are easily searchable using SharePoint search.

Level Two – Information Creation

Level Two in the maturity model means that we’re leveraging SharePoint for the creation of information and, once created, the information is maintained within SharePoint. Individuals are beginning to utilise SharePoint’s capabilities in the capture and creation of contact lists, contracts and calendars. SharePoint is acting as a central repository for information and people are starting to trust the information that’s stored there. Some of the information that is being created on the platform is also being deleted once its useful life has concluded.

People are starting to trust the information stored on SharePoint because they see that outdated information is being deleted or that information is being frequently updated so that the most recent information is available in this single location. There may still, however, be documents that are created outside of the SharePoint environment, but these works are starting to be stored and categorised on

SharePoint. Additionally, people see the benefit of the SharePoint solution and are asking more questions about how to leverage it to ease their workload and collaboration with others. The first time someone says to you, “I wish people external to our company could access SharePoint”, you know you’re on your way to Level Three.

Level Three - Leveraging

When a company or department is performing at Level Three, there are multiple individuals or departments that are leveraging SharePoint to resolve their business challenges. At Level Three, SharePoint is the authoritative source for the majority of information in an organization, focused solutions are being created using SharePoint’s out-of-the-box capabilities and light applications, such as project management portals and contract management document libraries, are being built by the user community with the assistance of a knowledgeable SharePoint person.

Most importantly, the user community recognises the benefits of SharePoint and it has entered into the flow of how people do business for a large number of people in your departments. There may even be some workflows associated with information as well and there are three or four blogs that have been started by people that want to share their knowledge with the rest of the organisation. At Level Three, people are linking the RSS feeds from important SharePoint lists to the Outlook 2007 or other RSS feed readers so that SharePoint information is presented to them rather than their being compelled to visit a particular SharePoint site. Overall, Level Three is the level within which a number of positive things are happening with your SharePoint environment…. but it’s not time to call SharePoint a success quite yet.

Level Four - Sharing

Level Four means that multiple contributors are editing documents and modifying content that others have placed on SharePoint. At this level, the organisation is moving away from the idea of individual ownership of information and is instead finding value and satisfaction of their individual contributions to the team. The value that SharePoint provides is understood by the majority of the user community and its use is being fostered within various departments by non-technical business people.

Additionally, investments are being made to increase SharePoint’s capabilities, such as third party web parts and the creation of solution-focused SharePoint templates. Additionally, SharePoint is being discussed within business unit or departmental meetings as a probable solution to issues that the group faces. If you are focusing more on opening up access to information on SharePoint rather than locking it down, you have reached Level Four collaboration on SharePoint.

Level Five – Process Enablement

At Level Five, all of the workers within a functional area of your company are using SharePoint for some purpose and workflows are being created to automate and enhance existing business processes. These processes are designed with the capabilities of SharePoint in mind and some departments are requiring that people outside of the department submit questions, support requests, expense reports, budget analysis and reports via SharePoint workflows.

SharePoint list alerts are used pretty heavily your users aren’t intimidated to attempt to solve a business challenge with SharePoint and perform a DIY (Do It Yourself) project before they begin to look for an off-the-shelf software application to address an issue.

Also, full life cycle business solutions are being created on SharePoint using.NET custom developed applications that meet a specific need within your organisation. In a Level Five department, the technology of SharePoint is fading into the background and your company is focused on decreasing the amount of time it takes to discover, access and utilise corporate information as the asset that it is. Congratulations!

From  8 Things You Must Do to Drive SharePoint Collaboration by Lee Reed, available in the Amazon Kindle store