Often businesses start off with an installation of the free SharePoint version with enthusiastic business sponsors who have visions of how SharePoint could meet their business needs. This is normally reinforced by reading the blazingly successful case studies from the Microsoft website, and by attending webinars/seminars provided by the Microsoft Partner community.
Then SharePoint goes viral. That is, employees who have used SharePoint in previous jobs start saying SharePoint can do this, that, and so on. (Note that they are not saying how it was done, and the budget and the resources that it needed.)
Fast forward three months — multiple site collections and team sites, an uninformed IT department, a stack of SharePoint books, and a lot of reactionary effort unrelated to people's jobs is spent on trying to learn a product and making it fit to a business process.
Fast forward another three months and you see disillusion among the user base, IT wondering how to get a handle on this technology, the support from users is waning, and the person who spearheaded the initial SharePoint activity over the past six months and who was leading the learning of the SharePoint technology has left and is working for someone else.
This train wreck story (yes, so early in the book) might seem a bit extreme, but it is not far from the truth, from what the authors have witnessed and is a classic case of not thinking ideas through.
William Deresiewicz, who gave a lecture to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in October 2009 said:
I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else's; it's always what I've already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It's only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea. By giving my brain a chance to make associations, draw connections, take me by surprise. And often even that idea doesn't turn out to be very good. I need time to think about it, too, to make mistakes and recognize them, to make false starts and correct them, to outlast my impulses, to defeat my desire to declare the job done and move on to the next thing.
The moment I hear someone say they are 'Trying to do something', it normally means that they will not succeed in the task. You don't try to cross the road, you cross the road.