Frequently Asked Questions
Information Strategy Technology, Governance and Change Management Managed Services Artificial IntelligenceMicrosoft Teams and SharePoint
Information Strategy
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What is the relationship between strategy and execution? Can a strategy adapt to change?
The path from strategy to execution is not one way. Change happens. Execution of a strategy includes people, processes, technology, competing priorities, regulatory constraints, safety concerns, deadlines, communication needs, and many other influences. As these factors interplay, they will inevitably necessitate adjustments to the strategy, which in turn will guide future execution. The importance of an adaptable strategy cannot be overemphasized in this symbiotic relationship.
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How can change management improve strategy execution?
By definition, a strategy involves change, and people are naturally resistant to change. The most effective technique to address this resistance is by clearly communicating change, and then reinforcing this with more communication and training. The most elegant strategy and execution will founder without effective change communications.
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What is a Records and Information Management strategy?
As the volume of an organization’s information grows, managing it compliantly becomes more and more challenging. A records and information management strategy is an organized, coherent roadmap and tools for moving an organization to an environment where information is organized, findable, actionable, and verifiable. It also supports a record’s lifecycle, driving compliance with legal and regulatory recordkeeping requirements.
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What is an Engineering Information Management strategy?
Engineering and maintenance information provides the foundation for safe, efficient operations in infrastructure intensive industries such as Power & Utilities, Energy, and Chemicals. An engineering information management strategy is an organized, coherent roadmap and tools for improving and delivering engineering data consistency, quality, integrity, version control, and authoritative sources. It also addresses compliance with legal and regulatory data requirements.
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How do I develop a strategy for digital transformation?
The CIO Forum Enterprisers Project describes digital transformation as the integration of digital technology into all areas of a business, fundamentally changing how you operate and deliver value to customers. It’s also a cultural change that requires organizations to continually challenge the status quo, experiment, and get comfortable with failure. Developing a digital transformation strategy includes combining leading information management practices, industry standards, and technology options, each supported by change management to consciously plan and prepare for this type of fundamental change.
Technology, Governance and Change Management
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How will this save my company money?
To reduce operating costs and minimize an organization’s information footprint, we develop a streamlined program for employees to create, access, use, and dispose of information throughout the information lifecycle. Our team researches the legal and regulatory retention requirements that apply to your organization, in order to define and implement defensible disposition of physical and electronic information. This allows the organization to derive cost savings wherever the information management program touches. The better you understand the information you create and use, the more value you can realize.
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How can we be sure that we have uncovered all our users’ requirements?
There are two dimensions to proper requirements coverage; breadth and depth. It is important to engage with users that represent all facets of the organization that will engage with, or be supported by, the system. It is equally important to ensure the conversation captures the needs of everyone, from “the shop floor” to “the executive suite.” Successful requirements coverage is measured by quality, not volume. In fact, one of the common mistakes that organizations make is to have so many requirements that they lose the focus on which requirements are important to success. Assurance in the requirements process comes from three things: investing the appropriate time and resources, engaging the breadth and depth of the organization, and having a track record of successful projects and lessons learned to use as an appropriate benchmark
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How long will my enterprise software procurement process take?
That can vary with the size and complexity of the organization, since engaging your stakeholders and gathering requirements are primary activities. However, a good rule of thumb is 60 – 120 days from project start until the RFP is issued. Once responses are received, you can plan on a similar timeframe to evaluate proposals, conduct demonstrations and other due diligence, and make a final selection.
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Do we need a separate Teams Governance Plan and SharePoint Governance Plan?
Your Teams Governance Plan and SharePoint Governance Plan are separate but complementary governing documents under an overarching Office 365 Governance Plan. While these are two separate tools within the Office 365 suite, Teams utilizes SharePoint as well as other Office 365 components such as One Drive for Business, and Exchange Online to manage Teams content. Teams governance must therefore, align with governance plans for those applications.
For example, SharePoint Governance focuses on site life cycle and management, Teams Governance focuses on the items mentioned in (previous FAQ) Microsoft Teams Governance best practices (i.e., Teams life cycles, naming standards, access, as well as data security and compliance. SharePoint sites provisioned through the Teams creation process, must still comply with SharePoint governance requirements.
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What is change management?
Change management focuses on the people side of your project implementation. Change management is a set of strategies and tools used to guide the individuals in an organization through a change and minimize the gap between current and desired behavior.
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What are the key elements of a change program?
When you attempt to roll out a project, you will encounter as many responses as there are affected individuals. You’ll need to use a complete toolbox of change strategies including:
- Change readiness – Understanding an organization’s capacity for change, highlighting specific areas of risk or resistance, and plan a strategy to deal with it.
- Stakeholder management – Building a coalition for change among your leaders and stakeholders and leveraging their influence.
- Communication – Building awareness of and desire for change in your organization with targeted specific audiences.
- Training – Providing people with the knowledge and ability to act on the change
- Reinforcement – Turning your project or initiative into a sustainable and lasting change.
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Where do I need to use change management?
Change in an organization disrupts the way people work. Change management is needed anywhere where there is a gap between old behavior including:
- Standing up new technology, tools, or software
- Implementing new processes and procedures
- Leading culture change within your organization
- Company reorganizations like mergers, acquisition and divestitures
Managed Services
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Is Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) the same as Managed Services?
Some people call this managed services and others call it business process outsourcing. What that really means is that you’re hiring an outside firm with experts to fulfill a business function for you — either embedded onsite or remotely.
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What are the benefits of choosing managed services or BPO as a solution?
Managed Services is the short and direct path to getting the support services you need without the investment, time commitment, and risk of hiring and training internal resources. By investing in managed services, you get:
- Enhanced Business Focus – Lose the distraction—focus your expertise and resources on your core business.
- Repeatable Processes – Leverage Access Sciences’ broad industry experience.
- Improved Quality – Expertise can’t be overrated. Our resources bring targeted expertise in their fields and we back that up with tangible service level agreements.
- Headcount Management – Transfer the burden and risk of headcount management to us.
- Oversight Relief – Lessen the burden of oversight with a single point of accountability
- Increased Accountability – Our managed services are provided via binding contracts with legal redress.
- Operational Expertise – Benefit from industry best practices, shared across our managed services operations.
- Exceptional Talent – Gain access to Access Sciences’ sustainable, high-quality talent pool, backstopped by our entire company’s knowledge and experience base.
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Will my organizaiton save money by choosing a managed services solution?
Our managed services resources strike an optimum balance between loaded labor cost savings, headcount management, accountability, quality, and expertise.
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Do you use offshore resourcing for your managed services offering?
No, all of Access Sciences’ managed services operations are located in the U.S. In fact, many of our managed services operations are co-located at the client’s site and function as an embedded part of their overall organization.
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What are the alternatives to outsourcing business processes?
There are generally two alternatives to managed services or outsourcing business processes: using internal resources (employees) and using resources from staffing agencies. While internal resources may deliver quality results, these can be a distraction from focus on your core business and make it difficult to manage headcount during the ups and downs of business cycles. Unlike our managed services, when using a generic staffing agency, accountability for quality results typically ends once resources have been placed.
Artificial Intelligence
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How important is data infrastructure?
Without consistent, accurate, timely data, even the most sophisticated AI model or powerful use case doesn’t work.
- Reliable data sources (internal or external) must be identified, in some cases contracted for, and integrated into your data infrastructure.
- Data must be normalized, cleansed, and in some cases transformed for consistency, otherwise models will not perform.
- Data must be received, processed, and available by the time it is needed.
- Most importantly, your data infrastructure must work. Every time.
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What about user adoption?
The premise and promise of AI means that some people’s jobs are going to change. When users can’t accept and support the changes that AI brings, projects fail. Change readiness, stakeholder management, communications, training, and reinforcement are all important factors to consider.
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What about MVPs?
Some AI solution providers tout their ability to develop a minimum viable product (MVP) at a very low cost. Typically, an MVP includes using your test data set to implement a simplistic base model. Unfortunately, a minimally viable solution doesn’t include the cost and effort to implement a resilient data infrastructure; ramp the model to reflect real world data volumes, the cost of data (internal and external); ongoing testing, validation, and retraining; careful curation of data/model/result sets; compliance requirements for explainability and ethical behavior; and don’t forget user adoption.
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What is AI component integration?
In the past, AI development entailed designing and building highly-complex, one off models that were fragile, error-prone, difficult to understand, and even more difficult to support. With the emergence of open source AI function libraries such as TensorFlow and PyTorch, this landscape has changed dramatically. Today, many complex AI problems can be addressed using functionality from these libraries, turning custom development from an esoteric exercise into a component assembly process – what we refer to as component integration.
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Why do AI projects fail?
AI projects share many familiar failure points with non-AI projects – scope creep, insufficient or missing requirements, unrealistic timelines, insufficient resources, lack of user input, inadequate testing, insufficient communication and training, lack of user adoption, insufficient post-implementation support, and many more. While these are all important concerns, AI projects are most susceptible to:
- Unrealistic expectations – When addressing some business challenges, AI can be extremely powerful, but its not magic. Businesses should carefully evaluate potential value and costs before making an investment.
- Unanticipated costs – AI investment requirements extend far beyond technology and implementation. You’ll also need to factor in the cost of data infrastructure; data acquisition(internal and external); ongoing testing, validation, and retraining; careful curation of data/model/result sets; compliance requirements for explainability and ethical behavior; and change readiness, stakeholder management, communications, training, and reinforcement.
- Solution viability – Of all failure points, solution viability is perhaps the most ambiguous and critical. For some business problems, AI just isn’t a viable approach.
- User acceptance – The premise and promise of AI means that some people’s jobs are going to change. When users can’t accept and support the changes that AI brings, projects fail.
Microsoft Teams and SharePoint
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Why should we choose Access Sciences to help with our Microsoft Teams strategy and challenges?
Access Sciences first seeks to understand the business goals you wish to achieve through the use of Microsoft Teams. Then our Microsoft 365 experts work directly with you to design and deliver a tailored solution considering information risk, ease of use, and sustainability throughout the entire implementation. We also offer training and reinforcement to increase user adoption and efficiency.
We are a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner that has delivered hundreds of Microsoft projects for our clients. To get in touch with our Microsoft 365 experts, send us an email at info@accesssciences.com.
“Our partnership with Access Sciences has been a fantastic one. The Pertempo framework for SharePoint, as well as the staff is first-rate! I gladly recommend them to anyone and hope to encourage other departments to engage with them.” – Jeff, State Government
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What are some minimal requirements to implement Microsoft Teams Governance best practices?
As with any new technology, an important part of achieving company-wide compliance with Microsoft Teams is establishing strong, sustainable governance. Based on our (Access Sciences and our clients) experience, here are the minimal considerations for Microsoft Teams Governance best practices:
- Teams naming conventions
- Who can create Teams?
- External and guest access
- Approved apps
- Data security and compliance
- Teams delete / archive policy
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Do you suggest Microsoft Teams implementation in multiple phases or opening all features/functionality at once to the enterprise?
To maximize compliance, Access Sciences recommends an incremental and measured approach across three phases: Plan, Implement, and Scale/Refine.
In the planning phase, you should:
- Establish a multi-disciplined team to assess your organizational readiness at both a technical and user-level.
- Develop your Strategy, Governance Plan, identify basic Teams processes, foundational Information Architecture (IA), and change management needs.
- Develop technical roadmap and plan for enterprise rollout.
In the Implement stage, you should:
- Implement basic processes such as consistent Team provisioning and decommissioning,
- Implement foundational IA, create training and communications content.
- Implement standards for Teams and allowed
- Execute phased rollouts to select organizational groups.
In the Scale/Refine stage, you should:
- Complete enterprise-wide rollout to all remaining organizational groups.
- Refine governance plan as you add more groups and scenarios.
- Monitor the right metrics to determine success at a company level.
- Monitor compliance using audit and administration tools.
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What is the default lifecycle of content associated with Teams? What should be considered in order to manage the lifecycle or retention of all those items?
Teams chat, channel, and file data are retained indefinitely by default. But as an Administrator, you can set up retention policies that specify whether to retain the data, delete it, or retain it for a specific time frame and then delete it.
To create and manage retention policies, visit the Microsoft 365 Compliance Center or by using PowerShell cmdlets. You can apply a Teams retention policy to your entire organization or to specific users and teams through three options: manually applied, automatically applied, or machine-learning applied (coming soon).
Here are some considerations and limitations to be aware of when working with Teams retention policies:
- A Teams retention policy will trigger a process to delete chat and channel messages. However, depending on service load, it may take up to seven days to permanently delete these messages from backend storage and Teams apps. Note that these messages will be searchable in both eDiscovery and end user searches till they are permanently delete
- Teams requires a retention policy that’s separate from other workloads, meaning you must create specific retention policies for Teams chats and/or channel messages and can’t include Teams in org-wide retention policies.
- Currently, retention policies for Teams only applies to standard channel messages – not private channel messages.
- Currently, Teams doesn’t support advanced retention settings like the ability to apply a policy to content that contains keywords or sensitive information.
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How do we mitigate Microsoft Teams information security risks when using Microsoft Teams guest access for external parties?
When collaborating with users external to your organization, it’s important to understand the difference between external access and guest External access is granted at the domain level, between organizations. If organizations A and B have external access enabled between them, any Teams user in A can find, contact, and set up meetings with any other Teams user in B, and vice versa. Note, external access does not grant access to Teams collaboration areas. To grant access to Teams collaboration areas, guest access must be granted at the individual level by adding the guest’s email account to the specific Team where they can then access shared files and collaborate. Note, guests cannot access an organization’s ODFB environment, create/modify teams, or upload files in 1-1 chats.
To protect your sensitive information, you need to have a strategy for collaborating securely with external users. These external sharing recommendations will get you started on the right foot:
- Collaboration: Enable external sharing by default and disable based on classification.
- Domains: Limit domains as required.
- Educate: Educate your users on how to share and what to share.
- Anyone Links: Use DLP to prevent the creation of “anyone” links for sensitive SharePoint and OneDrive for Business documents.
- Audit: Make security audits part of your governance process.