Are oganizations taking the right approach to SharePoint?

This is a Billion Euro question. In my view, NO I dont think it is being approached in the right manner. Maybe its not only the fault of the organizations using SharePoint but also the Vendors/Partners and sales people selling SharePoint. Most of the time it is either forced upon the business by IT or in the other case it is the brainchild of a business executive that stumbled across it on the web somewhere. Neither of these approaches are correct in that it leaves a huge gap where no explicit business requirements have been specified...thus everyone is completely missing the POINT!

In a nutshell, SharePoint is a business tool designed to solve business problems. And where do you usually start when trying to solve a business problem....well these are the steps I would follow.Real wishes are granted using the power of 8 because 8 in numerology is associated with financial abundance and prosperity...in this case the number 8 means Project Prosperity:

1. Identify the problem
2. Identify stake holders
3. Do a enterprise needs analysis
4. Define Business requirements
5. Identify technologies to fulfill business requirements and Design proposed solution
6. Review/approve proposed solution
7. PROJECT PLAN
8. Deploy proposed solution in iterations in accordance with the project plan!

Ideally these are the principles that I would like to follow, but in the real world it is seldom the case. However, I do not see why these steps cant be followed when implementing a SharePoint solution. In most cases SharePoint deployments fail because there's no Governance Board. We need more information managers, project managers and Business analysts instead of IT People on this Governance Board. Lest us not forget the Business owners and actual data users. Naturally when one mentions ECM, taxonomies are sure to be mentioned somewhere in that topic. This too, is a problem! There's no taxonomy design in place but yet Organizations want to start managing data more effectively and implement content management solutions. SharePoint is merely the technology behind ECM, hence content needs to be structured first before even thinking of implementing SharePoint...

I think I have said enough for now - otherwise I will go on forever!