When Microsoft needed someone to look at the product that would become SharePoint, they reached out to the KM team at the consultancy where Susan Hanley worked, American Management Systems (AMS).
The early software, “codenamed ‘Project Tahoe’”, set out to solve the knowledge management challenge that we’re still grappling with today: How do you get the right information, to the right people, on the right device, at the right time?
Heading up the Knowledge Management team at AMS, Hanley’s team were the poster children for Lotus Notes, the collaboration platform that defined enterprise knowledge sharing in the 1990s.
At the time, their work was even covered in a Harvard Business School case study about the pioneering program she was running there.
Arriving at AMS via Johns Hopkins and an MBA, Hanley was drawn into technology during a stint at a bank where she realized that the people working on the most interesting projects were the consultants advising the bank.
An early project involved one of the first commercial email services, in a project that brought her into contact with Vint Cerf, the internet pioneer whose work at DARPA helped lay the foundations for how information moves across networks to this day.
After eighteen years at AMS she joined Plural, a Microsoft Partner that had just won Partner of the Year. Two years in, Dell acquired them. Overnight she went from a company of two hundred people to one of thirty-nine thousand.
She spent the next years running the portal practice for Dell Professional Services, deploying what was now becoming SharePoint, building intranets, quietly establishing herself as one of the world’s leading authorities on the platform.
Ultimately, she says: “all intranets are about knowledge management.”
In 2005 she went independent. And has not looked back.
During that time the technology might have changed: Lotus Notes. SharePoint. Teams. And now, Copilot. But the knowledge management challenge remains.
“Everyone said knowledge management was going to die,” she says. “Well, it’s still here. And we still have the same problems. AI isn’t going to solve them.”
What it will do, she argues, is expose them.
Every organization that neglected its content governance, through Covid, through the frantic Teams rollout, through years of files named ‘v1’, ‘v2’, ‘final’, ‘this-time-I-mean-it-final’, is about to find out what happens when you put a powerful AI on top of twenty years of accumulated mess.
“Copilot isn’t hallucinating,” Hanley says. “You’re feeding it information that is not accurate. That’s on you.”
After 45 years working in this space, she has earned the right to say it.
Back then, what was the knowledge management problem you set out to solve and has that changed?
Susan Hanley (SH): The question has never changed. How do we get the right information to the right people, at the right time, in the right format, on the right device? That was it in the nineties. That is still it now.
What Copilot is trying to solve is exactly the same thing: how do we take the knowledge of the organization and surface it for you when and where you need it, in a way you can consume, even if you didn’t know it existed?
New tools. Same problem. The terminology rotates. The challenge doesn’t.
What makes a knowledge management solution actually work?
SH: Three things.
People who have sharing and consuming as part of their DNA: that culture has to exist or nothing else functions.
Processes that define where and when you contribute reusable content, how you have conversations around it, how you manage it through its lifecycle.
And technology: a place to put things that people can actually find. SharePoint fits very well into that third category.
But the piece that separates organizations that succeed from those that don’t is governance. People, process and technology are necessary. Governance is what sustains them.
At what point does an organization decide it needs help with knowledge management? Is it about size?
SH: Not really. I can work with organizations of fewer than fifty people. The trigger is more often intent than scale. “We are planning to grow. We want the structures and processes in place before we go from thirty people to three hundred”.
Right now, thirty people can talk to each other. Three hundred, you don’t even know each other. The more important question is: how critical is it that your collective expertise reaches the person who needs it?
In consulting, the person you put on the ground on a project cannot possibly know everything, but the firm can.
That is what we are ultimately trying to solve. And that, as it happens, is also what agents are trying to solve.
What role does governance play in knowledge management?
SH: Governance is the process that ensures content is managed, maintained and curated. I think of it the way I think about a garden. You need to prune the weeds. You need to get rid of the old stuff and keep things current. If you do all of that, if the people, process and technology are right and the governance is sustained, and then you put a Copilot or an agent on top of it, magic will happen.
But here is the problem.
We are very good at putting content in. We are terrible at taking it out when it is no longer useful. And AI cannot make that call for you. It cannot tell you whether this is the right version of a document, or whether a policy written in 2019 still reflects how the business actually operates.
That judgment is still human. The AI will just find it and surface it as if it were current.
Why is governance still such a persistent problem?
SH: Covid made it significantly worse. Microsoft Teams was often deployed fast so that people could keep working. There was no training. None. People threw content into Teams, into OneDrive, wherever was accessible, with no understanding of good content hygiene.
And then the emergency passed and everyone moved on. The mess stayed.
Now every one of those organizations wants to deploy Copilot. And Copilot will find everything. The outdated policy. The superseded contract. The over-permissioned folder someone created in 2021 and forgot about.
It is not a hallucination problem. But a governance problem. They’re not the same thing.
How important is ‘process’ in cleaning up the data mess and where do you start?
SH: You cannot clean up terabytes of chaos at once. It is paralyzing and it does not work.
The answer is divide and conquer.
Start by asking: what content is most important to this organization?
Without knowing anything specific about a company, I can already tell you three categories that matter: policies, procedures and contracts.
If you took just those three content areas, cleaned them up, organized them, and assigned clear ownership, you have already broken a very large problem into something manageable.
Then you sustain it by dividing accountability. HR owns this corner of content. Legal owns that one.
You make it explicit, define the priorities within each area, and this is the part most organizations skip, you ensure that content management is part of the job description or included in performance goals. People work on what they are paid and measured to do. If content governance does not appear in someone’s objectives, it will not happen.
Making content governance explicit demonstrates the importance to the organization – and gives people the time and space to pay attention to it. That, plus good retention policies, goes a long way towards creating an environment in which AI agents can add value – and knowledge can flow.
When is the right moment to tackle this?
SH: Two obvious triggers.
The first is modernization, moving from on-premises infrastructure to the cloud. That is the moment I love, because the methodology is simple: nothing comes across unless it has earned the right. We go full Marie Kondo. Has this content earned the right to exist on the new intranet? What business problem is it solving? Migration forces the conversation that organizations have been avoiding for years.
The second trigger, right now, is Copilot. Everyone wants the productivity gains. Nobody wants to hear that their content estate is not ready. But AI finds all of your governance failures, the over-permissioned content, the outdated documents, the duplicates, and consolidates them into a wrong answer. That tends to focus people’s attention very quickly.
What role does SharePoint Advanced Management play in helping organizations get sorted?
SH: If you buy just one Copilot license, SharePoint Advanced Management is available for the tenant. That gives your SharePoint administrator genuine visibility into where the content problems actually are: what is over-shared, what is stale, what needs attention first.
It helps you prioritize.
It is not the only solution, but it is a significant licensing gift from Microsoft. Every organization should have at least one Copilot license so they can use SAM to help manage their data estate.
On permissions, the Finnish MVP Sami Laiho has a line: “Admin rights are not human rights.” What is your take?
SH: He is exactly right.
Over-permissioning is not a technical failure. It is a governance failure rooted in a training failure.
People give others full control because it is faster and easier than working out the correct level of access, especially when nobody was properly trained to begin with.
The fix requires a real conversation between the business and IT. Information security wants to lock everything down. The business needs to function. Both positions are valid, and neither can operate in isolation.
If you lock down what the business needs, information will find its way out through consumer tools, through personal email, through whatever people can reach. You have not solved the security problem. You have just moved it somewhere less visible.
Who is actually in charge of governance?
SH: Everyone. And I mean that seriously, not as a dodge.
Governance is a joint responsibility between the business, legal, information security and IT.
The business defines what it needs to do its job. Legal and information security define the risks and constraints. IT builds and maintains the infrastructure.
None of them can own it alone.
What I tell organizations is this: do not build one giant repository and expect someone to manage it.
Divide the world.
Give each part of the business ownership of its content domain. Make them accountable. Build it into the framework. And invest in training, because governance without education is not governance. It is just a policy document that nobody reads.
You’ve often recommended two of Cloudwell’s SharePoint apps to your clients. What are they and why?
SH: The first is their Staff Directory app.
Most intranet product owners want to offer an employee directory as part of their solution. They want one that surfaces the org chart in a variety of ways and allows users to easily find and filter for people based on their department or manager or other attribute. And they want to showcase service anniversaries and sometimes, birthdays. All the data is available, but it’s just not something that is part of SharePoint “out of the box.
The second is their Calendar Overlay app.
SharePoint’s native calendar is, functionally, a list with some additional capability. It does not behave the way users expect a calendar to behave.
Cloudwell has built on top of that to make it act like a real calendar, and to overlay multiple calendars so you can view them together in one place.
Not every organization needs this, but when you need it, building it yourself is painful.
They have productized something that many organizations want. That is exactly the right instinct.
On a recent demo, Vesa Juvonen said Microsoft should build this functionality natively into SharePoint. Do you agree?
SH: I understand the sentiment. But the reality is more complicated than it first appears. Microsoft is not going to build a full calendar into SharePoint because they already have one, and it is one of the best in the world. It is called Outlook.
The reason organizations want a calendar in SharePoint is not that Outlook is insufficient. It is that they want their SharePoint content and their scheduling to coexist in one place.
That is a real and recurring need. Microsoft has chosen not to prioritize it. That gap is where Cloudwell’s Calendar Overlay app lives.
Should Microsoft build it eventually? Perhaps. Until they do, the need is real, the solution exists, and it works.
Watch Pat & Chris demo Cloudwell’s Calendar Overlay and Staff Directory apps to Microsoft’s Vesa Juvonen.
Susan Hanley is an independent consultant specializing in Microsoft 365, SharePoint and knowledge management strategy. Her governance frameworks are available at susanhanley.com. Want to hear her speak? She’ll be presenting at TechCon 365 in Chicago June 15-19.