Such a simple question! I was posed this question recently and I was at a temporary loss. Many of my clients are somewhat knowledgable when it comes to what SharePoint can do, functionality-wise, for their organization but how do you eloquently state the value of SharePoint without reiterating the benefits of the functionality? I thought this was an exellent question and I’m interested in how some of the experts in the SharePoint community may respond!
In my mind your question speaks to the value of collaboration for an organization – which speaks to why collaboration is important. I work through this question with a lot of clients and have documented my approach via this blog post:
http://benmcmann.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/the-business-case-for-collaboration/
If the organization can identify where better collaboration will help the business, you can then work towards how SharePoint could help that organization. At it’s core, SharePoint is about improving the way people work together to accomplish business goals – those goals could be strategic in nature, or tactical in nature (improving time off request process for instance), you will have several opportunities for improvement in either type of goal.
But an overall understanding of why collaboration has grown in importance over the last 30-40 years is a prerequisite for having a discussion around how an organization can derive value from SharePoint in my opinion.
My over simplified response is as follows:
The VALUE to SharePoint is the positive difference it makes to the organisation in making progress to it’s strategic goals.
The corollary of that is that, if SharePoint is not making a measurable positive difference at the organisational level then it is not adding value.
I hope that makes some kind of sense?
