My new role is.....

....... Senior SharePoint Specialist in the IT division Knowledge Management team at Canadian Tire Corporation !

Yep its official, well its been official for a while, as I near the end of my first week, but the word came down from HR that as long as I take a common sense approach, and don't give out any secrets, budget codes etc, then I can blog :-)

A common sense approach is good ! No, really..... actually I think what we have been waiting for is guidance on is whether or not I could blog some details of our programs that are underway and the work the KM team will be doing. No answer on that yet, so we will have to see, but even if I can't do a 'Journey in social media' type blog like Chuck did at EMC, I can still blog my own opinions on ECM and information management related subjects.

So, what does my new role involve. Well I am working at Canadian Tire Corporation headquarters, within a very large IT division. We have a small (and thus very elite ?) KM team, consisting of our AVP, the KM Manager, and me, the Senior Specialist - yep just the 3 of us :-)

My new role includes very SharePoint specific elements, and some very non-SharePoint specific elements, but in a SharePoint context, including:

• Metadata standards, policies and schema development


• Taxonomy development


• Working with stakeholders across IT and with the ECM team particularly


• Developing methodologies and techniques for using SharePoint as a collaboration platform and as a tool for knowledge capture


• To optimize SharePoint for project management, document management and as a knowledge management platform in general

There is a great deal going on in the IT organization here, moving to an SOA based enterprise architecture with lots of work on standardized platforms and migration away from legacy systems, so its bound to be both busy and interesting when we se set to in earnest. I think that will do for now, I was going to add a photo of the view from my 16th floor office, but my browser seems to be too old to let me position it within Blogger !!!