A common pattern we see in South African businesses, is migrating to SharePoint Online as is from Google Drive, Dropbox or on premise fileshares. The approach is to migrate all content containing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands, or millions of documents into a single document library.
This lift and shift approach may appear to be efficient, but it’s merely a first step in the much larger journey of true digital transformation.
If your content still looks something like this once you’ve migrated to SharePoint – you are only at level 1 of 5 in your SharePoint maturity journey :
The Problem with the Lift and Shift Approach
When you move your existing folder structure to SharePoint without reimagining how work happens, you’ve created a glorified file server in the cloud, just in a different location. You gain basic accessibility benefits but miss the transformative potential of the SharePoint platform.
Company file share structures are usually a chaotic mess of folders within folders, inefficient naming standards, duplicated content and complex folder permissions. These problems don’t disappear with migration—they simply move to a new home.
Common Pitfalls
- Navigation nightmares: Users struggle to find what they need in deeply nested folder structures.
- Version control issues: Multiple copies of the same document exist across different folders.
- Permission complexity: Inherited and broken permission chains create security vulnerabilities.
- Search limitations: Without proper metadata and site architecture, SharePoint’s powerful search capabilities remain largely untapped.
- Collaboration barriers: Team members work in isolation rather than leveraging collaborative features, resulting in silos and more duplicated effort.
The Hidden Cost of Standing Still
Companies that stop at lift-and-shift face significant hidden costs:
- Perpetuated inefficiencies – The same broken processes now run in a new environment.
- Competitive disadvantage – While you maintain the status quo, your competitors are leveraging platforms properly to transform their operations.
- Mounting technical debt – Accumulating millions documents in a single library for example, creates performance issues and ultimately requires costly remediation, (AI is expensive too).
- Diminished user adoption – Users quickly recognize when a new tool doesn’t actually improve their work experience, then lose interest in it. This makes it challenging to turn the tide later on.
Beyond Migration - The SharePoint Maturity Model
True digital transformation requires a strategic approach that goes far beyond simply moving files. We have this SharePoint Maturity Model. Each level of the SharePoint Maturity Model unlocks new capabilities and benefits:
- Level 1 – Basic (Lift and Shift)
- Level 2 – Developing
- Level 3 – Defined
- Level 4 – Managed
- Level 5 – Transformative
At this stage, you’ve simply relocated your existing file structures to SharePoint Online. While content is now accessible from anywhere, most of SharePoint’s collaborative and organizational features remain untapped. (More about the other levels in a future blog). Moving beyond a lift-and-shift approach requires thoughtful planning and execution.
What To Do Next
Your documents are migrated, what now?
Step 1: Decide the Future of Your Company
Before reimagining your SharePoint environment, take stock of your goals:
- Do you want to slingshot your business into the future?
- Do you want to get ahead of your competitors?
- Do you want to scale your business by hiring more staff or acquiring new companies?
- Do you want your business to run itself?
- What kind of culture do you want in your business?
Or do you just want to tread water and keep doing things as you always have? I don’t think any business can afford to do that.
These are important decisions to make, because they will decide the direction of your business as well as its future sustainability.
We live in the technology, information age – for a business to truly thrive, it needs various tools to help it do so. SharePoint is one of them. From an internal operational efficiency perspective, having a strategically designed SharePoint environment in an invaluable business asset. If SharePoint doesn’t feel like that to you, it’s not been configured correctly to give you value.
Step 2: Assess Your Current State
Take a long hard look at what you have :
- Audit your content to identify what’s valuable and what’s redundant.
- List existing paper-heavy processes that could benefit from automation.
- Identify bottlenecks that are slowing down progress.
- Evaluate user behaviors and pain points to identify improvement opportunities.
- Understand the organizational culture and its readiness for change.
- Do you understand what the platform can even offer you?
- Ask yourself if you are the problem holding the company back. Can you be humble enough to admit this and change your ways?
Step 3: Envision Your Goal State
Envision what a mature technology implementation would look like for your organization:
- Finding the right version of a document the first time.
- A team that is collaborating together effectively online instead of just emailing documents around.
- Compliance audits are a dream and passed with no audit findings raised.
- Content is secured and IP protected.
- An engaged staff compliment eager to learn new things and make innovative suggestions to improve business processes.
- Automated business processes that trigger reminders and status changes, with dashboards of progress to create transparencies and smooth operations.
Step 4: Implement in Phases
Rather than attempting a complete transformation overnight, take an incremental approach. (This is the part where you may need help. Lets Collaborate has performed hundreds of restructures and optimizations. Contact us for an assessment).
- Define a logical site architecture that reflects your organizational structure as well as how content flows between areas.
- Design a home page that is a launching pad to all things in your business.
- Create sites, lists, libraries and metadata structures that facilitate powerful search and filtering.
- Design content types that standardize document properties and templates.
- Plan workflows that automate routine processes.
- Establish governance policies that ensure quality and compliance.
- Begin with high-value, high-visibility use cases to demonstrate value.
- Implement changes department by department to manage change effectively.
- Prioritize improvements that address the most significant pain points.
Step 5: Nurture Adoption
Digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. It is suggested that people need to hear something 7 times before it is absorbed. For complex subject matters (like most technologies), it’s in the region of 15 – 20 times repetition. To compound that, 70% of new information is forgotten within 24 hours. This means you cannot simply give your users one training session on how document libraries work in SharePoint and expect them to just get it. Training, adoption and change management is a long-term exercise.
- Provide comprehensive training tailored to different audiences.
- Create champions within each department or on company level to drive adoption.
- Regularly communicate the benefits and successes of the new platform and way of working.
- Celebrate quick wins to build momentum and support.
- Implement change management and ongoing training for at least year after the initial rollout.
Step 6: Measure and Iterate
The world doesn’t stand still, neither does technology or your business.
- Regularly review usage statistics to identify adoption patterns.
- Gather feedback and make adjustments based on user experiences.
- Continuously refine and improve your approach based on real-world experience.
- Keep an eye on new developments on the platform to see if they can help your business, (but balance that with shiny new toy syndrome; get the basics in place before going for advanced tech).
Your Future
Yes, this journey requires time, money and resources. But imagine the alternative of staying on level 1 whilst all your competitors move systematically to level 5? You not only risk losing competitive advantage; the hidden costs of lost productivity and missed opportunities will become far more expensive in the long run. It takes vision and resilience to go up a level, but the benefits are long-lasting.
- Increased productivity: Users spend less time searching for information and more time creating value.
- Enhanced collaboration: Teams work together more effectively regardless of location.
- Improved compliance: Content is properly classified, secured, and retained according to policy.
- Reduced costs: Automation eliminates manual processes and reduces errors.
- Greater agility: Companies can respond more quickly to changing business conditions.
- Competitive advantage: Mature SharePoint environments and other enterprise level platforms for different business needs, enable innovation and differentiation.
