Change management and adoption marketing are among the biggest challenges the South African Post Office (Sapo) has faced in its implementation of a SharePoint-based knowledge management solution to streamline the flow of documents across its 16 000 employees and more than 1 600 branches.

That’s according to the Post Office’s knowledge management specialist, Stella Pole, who says that the biggest challenge in rolling out the system lies in changing the behaviour of users who are used to hoarding information on their hard drives and sharing data on memory sticks.

But the organisation is succeeding in changing its culture to one where everyone shares information and sees it as a mutually shared resource, she adds. Sapo uses SharePoint to share working knowledge such as strategy documents, policies, standard operating procedures, project lists and many other documents that used to sit on hard drives and in file cabinets scattered across the organisation.