SharePoint growth

An interesting conversation popped up the other day.  There is no doubt the success and usefulness of Sharepoint out of the box, but many IT executives/business execs see it as "anarchy" or more p.c. "organic growth".  They do not see the overall business value of SharePoint from what I'll call a file server replacement/collaborative website.  To put it another way, CxO's do not see the business value (cost vs ROI) from an organic deployment.

Should Microsoft publish not only technical guidance, but guidance on how to maximize the value of their products?  If you look on IT Showcase, we do a very good job with the "how IT does it" but I could only find a few "Why MS uses it" type study on SharePoint.  I view (as does the CxO) as SharePoint is a piece of infrastructre that is used to build a solution around.  Its not SharePoint the product that is the focus.  Rather, its we have a communication problem and we can use SharePoint to solve that problem.  This is a pretty clear example.  Where it gets more interesting is when the problem does not scream "use sharepoint".  For example, We need to manage our IT portfolio.  There are probably a million ways from a technology standpoint to solve that problem.  Why choose SharePoint to solve that problem?  Basically, using the strengths of the product to deliver business value.

Then the question always turns to, well how does Microsoft use it?  I know we have our main portal, as well as the 'organic' user/team collaboration sites.  But, Im not sure what solutions are integrated.  We probably have a mangers web site which uses SharePoint to track KPI's...but I've not personally used something like that.  I cannot really think of any other enterprise solutions I use that are based on SharePoint.  I think we will be publishing a lot of new content with the launch of SharePoint 2007.  And as someone pointed on in my discussion that there is a lot of existing content, you just have to dig around to find it.  I think we will make it more discoverable as well.  Now that the product has matured and its had success, I think we will see more integration of SharePoint in business solutions.

I know this is a great space for partners / 3rd parties, and also vertically specilized soltuions. A great example is the SharePoint Learning Kit (formerly Class server).  You have to look a little deep to know this is a SharePoint based solution.  If you were a school, it is easy to explain to a CxO the business value of this solution - then you are not just selling a technology.

 

I'm interested to know how other companies solved this problem?  Have you ran into the 'organic growth' only to be asked by management to stop deployments until a strategy is formed?