Retroactive SharePoint Governance
While attending the SharePointFest Chicago event, I was able to delve deeply into topics around governance (I presented a well-attended session entitled 'SharePoint Governance: Best Practices from Migration through Administration') and discuss different perspectives on the topic with some of my fellow presenters -- which brought up a concept that I had not thought about for some time.
It began at lunch with Chris Beckett (@sharepointbits) and Mark Miller (@eusp) at a fantastic Mexican restaurant around the corner from the Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL (Chicago area) called Maria's. Chris and I extended our conversation from last week's Puget Sound SPUG around the misconceptions around governance, and the disrespect given to IT organizations (mostly undeserved). We covered several topics surrounding some of the chaos and lack 
of leadership surrounding business decisions affecting IT and, specifically, SharePoint. This chaos, we agreed, often led to a lack of respect (and funding) for governance, which is often viewed as a nice-to-have rather than an essential aspect of any deployment.
In short, governance is usually not brought up until pain is already happening.
At dinner, we jumped right back into this discussion. While Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge) and I did much of the talking (shocking, I know), there was great input from Kim Frehe (@chomp1313) and my Axceler compatriots Mark McGovern (@docpointmark), Jill Kunkel (@queenkunk), and Melissa Vitti (@melissavitti) on the subject.
What came up was a phrase I have used in the past -- retroactive governance. In a nutshell, the concept is that organizations are rarely (if ever) able to plan out and orchestrate their governance strategy from a clean slate. Instead, governance is something organizations turn to when they're already waist-deep in problems, and they are looking for a way out.
What kinds of problems? Site and environment proliferation, permissions issues, content and storage issues, rogue customizations, and unauthorized tools and solutions, among others.
The idea of retroactive governance is not new. In fact, I brought this up in a joint presentation with Joel Oleson (@joeloleson) at TechReady4 in 2007, where we shared some of our team's experiences with internal migrations to the 2007 platform (I blogged about it here). We found that governance generally takes root in the darkest hour, rather than as a proactive process. It's great to talk about best practices from a clean slate perspective, but what most companies need is how to shovel themselves out of where they are today.
As I shared in my session yesterday, ControlPoint is a great way to quickly clean up, re-organize, and audit your SharePoint environments as way of getting your governance processes back on track. There's a reason why ControlPoint is the runaway leader in the SharePoint Administration space -- it is simply the best tool for the job.
If you've not yet seen ControlPoint, register for a live demo today or watch a 15-minute video of this award-winning product.