Have you thought about SharePoint governance?
There is a lot of talk in the SharePoint community at the moment about SharePoint governance, but what exactly does it entail? Well, at a very basic level many people would say that it is a set of guidelines, rules, responsibilities and procedures on how SharePoint should be used within an organisation.
However, if you look deeper (i.e. Wikipedia) at the word governance it actually “derives from the Greek verb κυβερνάω [kubernáo] which means to steer and was used for the first time in a metaphorical sense by Plato.”
Therefore, SharePoint governance is not just a set of fixed rules and regulations but is more about how you guide/teach/coach your users to ensure that you maximise the investment you have put into the SharePoint technology.
So, if you are just at the beginning your SharePoint implementation and are considering putting together a SharePoint Governance policy document, where do you start? Well first of all, congratulations on even considering governance at this early stage. Most organisations we encounter did not consider governance and SharePoint has grown in a very organic and unstructured manner.
One of the main reasons that SharePoint has grown at such a pace is that it can be implemented very easily, and SharePoint sites can be created and deployed very quickly. This can result in “SharePoint Sprawl” where sites are created with little thought and very quickly it becomes unclear as to which sites are actually used and which are not.
A good starting point for defining your SharePoint governance plan is this handy checklist provided by Microsoft. However, the bad news is that a successful governance strategy is not something that can packaged, purchased, and installed over a weekend. It is an on-going process that will require regular reviews to monitor the effectiveness of you plan, which may then require redefinition.
SharePoint Governance Process
Your entry point to this process will depend on the stage of your organisation with your SharePoint implementation. In an ideal world, a governance plan will be built prior to implementation. The starting point should be to define the roles, responsibilities, procedures, etc., that your plan will consist of. However, this is not always possible due to the organic nature of SharePoint deployments that we discussed earlier, so a review of your environment may be the first thing required
This analysis of SharePoint will help you to understand how your users are interacting with SharePoint. For example, what sites are out there, are they used, who has access, what type of content are they uploading, how many content databases are there, etc. Using this information, you can then start defining your governance plan to hopefully bring the SharePoint environment back under control.
When it comes to enforcing your SharePoint governance strategy, it is important not to be too restrictive. Users can be put off by technology very easily, so it is important to have a balance. This is why regular reviews are important to ensure your governance policies are effective. This should not simply be a review of the technology, but must include your users. For example, conduct user surveys to understand what they think of SharePoint and how they use it. The results may then lead you to changes to your initial governance policies.
SharePoint Governance Considerations
Governance within SharePoint is very similar to every other enterprise system. Some of the considerations for your policy document should be:
-
Roles and responsibilities
Key stakeholders, e.g., who will be responsible for managing the SharePoint implementation and reviewing how effective the governance policies are? Centralised or decentralised administration? Who can create sites? Who will manage security?
-
Infrastructure
Farm topology, what servers/services are required? How many content databases are needed? How many site collections? What site quotas level should be enforced?
-
Configuration
Meta data/taxonomy definitions? Look and feel - how to manager master pages, site themes, navigation, etc? AD groups, SharePoint groups or both for managing permissions?
-
Users
How to ensure end user adoption? Training? Support?
This is a very small list but are certainly questions that should be asked when defining your governance policy. Good luck!
And for more information on our award-winning product ControlPoint and how it can help you organize, automate and control your SharePoint governance, take a look at our datasheet here, or sign up for a live webinar here.