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the Free CMSWire NewsletterOne of the major benefits of participating in SharePoint events worldwide is the ability to get to know some of the thought leaders in the community and to leverage the collective unconscious. In between sessions, the hallways are usually lined with experts and attendees sharing their experiences, weighing in on the trending topics of the day. At a recent event, I found myself sitting in the lobby of the convention center with a couple fellow presenters discussing SharePoint governance: what it is, why it’s now such a hot topic in the community, and what people need to do about it. Rather than produce an opinion piece on the topic, I thought it would be interesting to share the roundtable dialog.
I kicked off the conversation by asking, "What is governance and is it important?" Weighing in on the topic were myself (@buckleyplanet), Paul Swider from OnClick Solutions (@pswider), Chris Riley from CloudShare (@rileybeebs) and Ant Clay from 21 Apps (@soulsailor).
Chris: Governance is a must. The trick I’m finding with pitching this to the market is there is a general lack of understanding of “what” governance is, “who” is responsible for it, and “why” put in the effort. I believe that the definition of governance is in the process of changing. Governance used to be a task of write, publish, forget. The way governance should be treated is as a collaborative process of building guidelines that make SharePoint meet and exceed goals during implementation phase, and ensure adoption is successful and appropriate in the production phase, and looking into the future extended into other applications. To me, governance is just as important a part of a SharePoint project as project management or requirements documents. They are all a part of the blueprint for SharePoint success. Spend the right amount of effort upfront, save effort and stress later.
Ant: I always think back to the Latin definition of governance, which is “to steer.” Just like sailing, you have a starting point and a destination. Governance is the course you sail (very rarely straight-line and unaffected by external influences) to get to your destination (goal). My view is that you will for 9 out of 10 projects end up with “SharePoint Celery” without an appropriate level of “governance” throughout the lifecycle of the technology project, i.e., covering the technical assurance (make sure the IT platform is running), the business reasons (what and the why), the project itself, and then the ongoing running, maintenance and, of course, continuous improvement back into more projects.
Paul: Governance might be one of the most overused terms in the SharePoint community. Governance exists at many levels in different organizations. There is corporate governance, legal governance, project governance, system governance and many more. SharePoint governance might fall under system governance. It is a small piece of what might be a much bigger effort. Most often SharePoint governance discussions are a sub-topic of system governance, specifically one of many systems in our organization. We can begin to break governance issues down to small efforts.
Christian: This topic is really starting to mature in the SharePoint space. Paul, I agree that governance is overused and many times applied generically to anything that has to do with administration, optimization and the ongoing management of SharePoint. I agree with the idea that this is just another facet of a broader, company-wide governance policy. Your corporate, legal, project and system governance models have absolutely nothing to do with SharePoint, but SharePoint governance should be traceable back up to the higher-level initiatives. The specific governance activities are much more targeted than your corporate initiatives, of course. Yes, there is governance in place to manage our ERP system, but how that is managed — and the specific policies and procedures adopted by the stakeholders — may look very different than what is adopted by the SharePoint team and its stakeholders.
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