Editorial
Meta's recent high-profile announcement that it was dropping Workplace provoked a lot of commentary in the industry. Pundits debated the shortcomings of the product versus employee experience platforms and the ill-fit of an enterprise product being offered by a B2C vendor.
All of these prognoses may be correct, but if I were a customer who bought a product that had seven million users built by one of the world’s leading technology companies, I think it's reasonable to assume it would have a longer shelf life. Similarly, an organization investing in implementing in Microsoft Viva Topics (a product launched in 2021 and still promoting new features last summer) may have assumed that this was a product that might be around a little longer.
While high profile product sunsetting like these are relatively uncommon, they remind us we can't always assume a vendor will indefinitely continue to provide the products we rely on. It can happen with the largest technology companies in the world, and happens even more often as start-ups go bust, when a company is acquired or when providers pivot or make the difficult commercial decision to withdraw a product.
The Vendor-Led Digital Workplace
These days, most digital workplaces are essentially vendor-led. We rely on a portfolio of different enterprise products — in many cases, from Microsoft — to get our work done.
Our collective overreliance on vendors puts the onus on us to mitigate the inevitable risks involved when a product is withdrawn. A lot of the time this is about having a Plan B that kicks in when a product gets withdrawn or comes to end of life. Usually the announcement is followed by a sufficient time to act and at times the announcement may suggest an alternative as well. For example, Meta suggested Workplace users turn to Workvivo, which is a good product with a lot going for it — but of course there are alternatives too.
But when there isn’t sufficient time, it can make us wish we’d focused more on governance when we had the opportunity.
Related Article: Meta Shutters Workplace. Now What?
Governance to Reduce the Impact of a Sunsetted Tool
Having the right governance in place is the best way to reduce the risks and minimize the fall-out from your vendor sunsetting your favorite digital workplace product, a situation that is essentially out of your control. What you can control are three essential things:
- Establish robust vendor due diligence when you select a product.
- Keep an eye on what your vendor is doing with your product.
- Introduce governance controls and processes so it is easier and quicker to move to another product.
What to Do During Procurement
Most companies will have due diligence on a vendor as part of their procurement process and even have vendor attributes listed within the non-functional requirements. This will cover everything from stability to financial independence to more subjective areas such as shared values. Essentially your procurement process needs to identify the level of risk with installing a digital workplace product. Identifying the chance whether your vendor will go bust, get bought or retire the product will be part of that.
When we do intranet or digital workplace product evaluations for clients, vendor attributes are something we consider. Is this a good fit for both the short-term and the longer-term? A picture of what customers will experience can often be gained by speaking to existing customers. However, product paths are very hard to predict. Getting acquired can result in investment and improvement in a product, such as Zoom and Workvivo, but also deterioration, with some notable examples of new vendors who simply don’t look after the product they’ve acquired.
Related Article: Why You Should Have a Plan B for Your Digital Workplace Tools
Warning Signs Your Product May Be Retired
There’s nothing you can do to prevent your vendor withdrawing or retiring a product, but you can certainly keep an eye out for warning signs. Has investment in the product seemingly dried up? Is the product roadmap a shadow of its former self? Is the company seemingly focused on other priorities, such as generative AI or the metaverse? Is it ploughing all its efforts into new, unrelated areas? Is there any analyst or press commentary or industry gossip from your peers?
These sort of questions are always worth keeping in mind, not only for the potential retirement of a product but simply to identify when the evolution of the product has slowed and it is offering less value. Perhaps it is time to consider a new product, vendor or upgrade?
Introducing Governance
Intranet and digital workplace consultants spend a lot of time advocating for the need for governance and a consistent operating model to ensure that their management processes run like clockwork and deliver both value and a strong user experience. When you have governance and robust operational controls in place, it puts you in a strong position to respond appropriately should you need to change vendors, even in a restricted period of time.
When intranets or collaboration platforms have little governance in place, migrating to a new platform involves far more work. For example, the team may need to spend considerable time working on migrating the content. It will be a lot smoother and quicker with governance in place that establishes:
- Who the owners of each piece of content is, as well as the related roles and responsibilities.
- The purpose behind the content.
- The content that you have already meets publication and brand standards and doesn’t need to be completely written from scratch.
Similarly, if you have a social platform like Workplace and you’re introducing a new tool like Workvivo it will be easier if you know who owns each community, and you don’t need to do a huge clean-up and consultation exercise to establish which groups need to have a presence on the new platform.
A focus on governance makes finding the right person to make difficult decisions, clear communication around processes, sorting out roles and responsibilities, reworking content, coordinating everything, having to make the business case — all the things that add time, effort and stress to a migration project — much easier because you've already worked out three quarters of these questions with your governance plan. It means you can avoid the last-minute rush and reduces the inevitable compromises that get made when you don’t have enough time to properly migrate a platform. Unfortunately, all too many teams succumb to the temptation of not introducing governance or doing so and then letting it slip.
Related Article: You Rolled Out Your Remote Workplace in Record Time. Now Let's Talk Governance
Sunset Now
Of course, vendors will have an agenda. They need to make money with their products and evolve their offerings. Every product has a lifecycle and inevitably one day it will be retired. If you're in a digital workplace team, you’ll likely work with multiple vendors who you rely on.
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When you commit to governance, you not only reduce the risks around product retirements — you also put yourself in a position of strength to provide a high-quality user experience, drive adoption, generate value and stay productive.
Dealing with product retirements, whether expected and highly unexpected, are an inherent part of digital workplace management. Invest time and effort in governance. Because you never know when the sun will set on your digital workplace product.
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