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By Nick Inglis, Director, Professional Development at AIIM
October 16, 2011 - 5:01 PM
Most popular SharePoint websites try to categorize their content based on the type of SharePoint user that comes to the website. This same categorization ends up applying to many SharePoint events as well. There are the 3 little boxes of "End Users, IT Pros & Developers". Firstly, please don't take this post as an assault, merely a suggestion, if you run one of these websites or events. IT Pros and Developers seem very fitting titles to me, it's the term "End User" that makes me cringe every time I need to utter it.
End Users never refer to themselves as end users. End users is a generic and nameless term that software companies use for the people who actually use their software. At events I rarely hear someone refer to themselves as an "end user", mostly because the term itself is a bit insulting and vague. In most other circles where the term "end user" was popular through the 1990s and 2000s it has been replaced. Somehow, we in the SharePoint community missed the memo.
I'd like to make the suggestion that we obliterate the term "End User" and replace it with two separate terms, based upon the actual function of the individuals who are using SharePoint.
"End users" are generally the people who use our SharePoint instances, whose adoption of SharePoint ensures our success. These are the general users of SharePoint who upload content, fill out metadata, and collaborate in teams. These are the people for whom SharePoint was created.
For these people, I believe the title of "Knowledge Worker" is more broadly applied beyond the world of SharePoint. The term Knowledge worker was coined by the masterful Peter Drucker in 1959 and in most other software-centric circles, this is the term that is utilized for "End Users". With a system like SharePoint that is focused on the management of knowledge through collaboration, ECM, & ERM, this seems like it would be a fitting title.
"End users" also encompass the people that we delegate site administration to. The role of a site administrator is a very important role and very different from that of a Knowledge Worker. These SharePoint users have a myriad of tasks to perform and depending upon our SharePoint instances, they may actually have more work to do than the IT Pros and Developers. It's actually a bit embarrassing that we refer to these folks with the same term as a general SharePoint user.
The folks that we delegate administration to should probably be referred to as "Site Administrators" and it's a term that I've seen as an additional category in some SharePoint events. These specialized Knowledge Workers deserve some credibility and respect for their work, so let's not call them users of the end.
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This post and comment(s) reflect the personal perspectives of community members, and not necessarily those of their employers or of AIIM International
