SharePoint Administration | SharePoint Migration

The SharePoint Governance Shift from Centralized to Decentralized

  

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Beyond the environmental and cultural shifts in thinking about moving from a structured, centralized SharePoint deployment to a more ad hoc, decentralized model is the need to rethink your SharePoint governance. As I outlined in my SDTimes article on moving from centralized to decentralized models, governance is the single most important aspect of making your SharePoint migration (or first deployment, for that matter) successful. Without a proactive governance model built on best practices combined with your own internal learning (i.e. applied to your unique corporate culture and systems/IT methodology), your SharePoint deployment will likely struggle, end users will not adopt it, and you will have created a very expensive file share repository.

Moving from a portal model to the "SharePoint model" where end users have much more control at how they collaborate (team sites, My Sites, social computing, folksonomies) can have an incredible effect on cross-team collaboration and innovation in your company, but it can also be an administrator's worst nightmare because of the massive increase in content and metadata and support requests. You need to know what you're doing, and to be prepared for this shift in usage patterns. The more you lower the barriers of entry to collaboration, the more likely people are to use SharePoint. The new service applications in SharePoint 2010 can be a wonderful thing for helping you  open up your environment with new end user controls while simultaneously rolling out new centralized controls around permissions and document and metadata management. The key is to be ready with a governance plan.

The first step is to push responsibility to the site administrators…..even though they may do strange things. This is the key to empowerment in SharePoint -- distributed management. But don't do it blindly. Understand what can be delegated, clarify their roles and responsibilities, and understand the skill levels needed for each level of control.

Here are some best practices for building out your governance model:

1. Have a plan.
   Let your end users know that they will have measured freedom within your new environment. Let your site, site collection, and farm administrators know how the changes will affect them, and your strategy for managing this new model.
2. Create a governance site.
   There should be a single place where everyone can go to understand how your SharePoint environment is being managed, how to request access and permissions, who sits on the governance board, change management process for requesting new features and services, and so forth. Make this site the rule of law -- one place you can go to get the full picture.
3. Create an internal SharePoint user group.
   There needs to be a venue where end users, administrators, and management can come together regularly to discuss what is working, and what is not working, and how the system should be optimized. It can be a monthly lunch session, or a weekly conference call. Whatever works for your organization. Even if its 2 people getting together on a regular basis, its important to have this dialog available, and -- equally important -- show that these discussions affect change in the system.
4. Enlist your portals users and content authors.
   Make it part of your strategy to enlist the experts and influencers in your organization, both to participate on your governance board, and in your user group. Reach out to them and let them know (regularly) that their input is appreciated (and let their management chain know how valuable their input has been). This is a key to future end user adoption, because the masses generally follow these influencers.
5. Clearly define roles and responsibilities.
   Know the roles (site admins, site collection admins, farm admins, management, governance board, end users) and their responsibilities up front. Don't have anyone signing on to help without them having an understanding of what they're signing up to do.
6. Outline your taxonomy, communicate it, refine it (and then rinse, repeat).
   Taxonomy and metadata drives EVERYTHING in SharePoint 2010. Impress upon everyone the importance of launching with a robust taxonomy, and the importance of maintaining it going forward. This should be one of the central responsibilities of your governance board -- the health and well-being of your taxonomy.
7. Outline your search strategy.
   Over and above taxonomy, what are your actual tools for search? This sits right behind #6 above.
8. Outline your social media strategy.
   Social is yet another layer of search, and helps connect end users. What are your plans? If this is all new to your company and culture, you may want to consider a phased approach. Don't just turn on these features because they are available. Understand what the features are, how they fit into your business processes and culture, and invest in a metered approach so that end users have time to adopt and embrace.
9. Understand any regulatory or compliance concerns.
   Depending on your industry, this could be a major factor of your governance planning. SharePoint out-of-the-box may not provide the right level of visibility and process transparency that you need, so while end users are anxiously awaiting the new system, you may need to do some custom development or reporting to meet your compliance requirements. Just be sure to communicate what is happening to your end users so that you're sufficiently managing their expectations.
10. Migrate your data, leveraging your metadata.
    If you're migrating from 2003 or 2007 to SharePoint 2010 (with full-fidelity or just the content), be sure to take advantage of your new taxonomy so that end users can find their content again. Don't rush this process -- take advantage of your migration to clean up and reorganize.
11. Go slow (or fast). Just be careful.
    Go as fast (or as slow) as your environment, culture, and governance model allows. The point here is to do it the right way, and not allow outside pressures to dictate how fast to move. Spend your time planning up front and you will dramatically decrease the time spent cleaning up the mess later.
12. Learn and evolve.
    No governance model is 100% perfect the first time. Build into your plans time to test, iterate, and test again. Let people know that this is an evolution -- and that their role is essential -- and you will get plenty of feedback, resulting in a better, stronger SharePoint platform.

Remember, governance is a series of guidelines to live by, not rules to die by. Do what makes sense. Be flexible. And iterate, iterate, iterate.