If your engineering team is building your governance plan, you’re doing it wrong.

The first mistake you made was ignoring the advice you received from Microsoft, from your consultants, and from the expert community, to build out a governance strategy as part of your overall SharePoint planning. Like flood insurance, most people don’t think about governance until they’re waist-deep in SharePoint sprawl and waking up at night in a cold sweat with change management nightmares. Don’t get me wrong—you probably have really smart administrators and developers who know the technology inside and out. And yet here you are, wondering how you’re going ever to clean up, get things organized, and get your SharePoint environment back on track.

There’s the real issue. In your head you’re thinking “Yeah, I need to insert some governance, and that’ll fix everything.” But you have no idea what it is. Or where to start. Or whether the things you do now will have any impact.

The fact is that governance has less to do with the technology and more to do with defining your goals for the system and how you plan to proactively manage SharePoint toward meeting those goals. Governance has as much to do with defining the business values you’d like to achieve as the day-to-day tactical steps of monitoring and managing your platform. But most companies don’t think this broadly. They see it as a set of policies and procedures around things such as content database size, permissions management, and compliance monitoring. If you’re like most companies, you don’t have a plan for how you engage with your users, you don’t have a method for tracking and measuring the value of your SharePoint initiatives, and you don’t have a procedure for how to engage with your leadership team. But those are all critical aspects of a successful governance strategy.

So, admit it. Admit that you have no idea what governance is and that you are powerless. It’s the first step in the 12-step program toward governance sobriety, and I’m here to help you through it.

Seek to Understand

Everyone is talking about SharePoint governance these days. The topic is popping up at SharePoint events around the globe, with the search term SharePoint governance returning 3,220,000 results on Bing. Even those who are known more for their deep technical expertise are being drawn into the conversation and are sharing their limited perspectives on what governance means to them and how it should be managed (usually at a very granular level) within SharePoint.

Your corporate governance strategy is an organized, orderly way to approach business problems and quickly come to an agreement on solutions. In a perfect system, it would be part of your company culture, where everyone is involved (at some level) in the decisions being made around IT. Unfortunately, most governance models fall short of what is needed for the organization, if it exists at all.

The primary reason governance has become the topic du jour is because of the SharePoint history associated with end user adoption. We are having a discussion at this point in SharePoint’s maturity because the platform has grown so rapidly—both as a product in Microsoft’s portfolio and within the organizations where it has been embraced by passionate end users. Although sales of SharePoint licenses may be reaching a certain saturation level, licenses sold don’t always equal platform deployed, much less end users fully engaged. As user adoption increases, the platform reaches the limits of its default settings, introducing concerns around managing and scaling the platform, business productivity, and, inevitably, governance issues. More end users on the platform + more activity per user = more companies needing to think about proper SharePoint management and governance.

The purpose of governance in an organization is to create a decision support system to encourage desirable behaviors in system usage. Properly designed governance models follow a specific strategy, such as better customer responsiveness, improved innovation, or identification and measurement of the cost effectiveness of your IT programs. Successful organizations are proactive in their design and use of a governance infrastructure, including committees, financial reviews, approval workflows, and other organizational tools that drive the decision-making process. An effective governance model will help your company manage and measure your systems and will play a significant role in helping your IT organization perform its role in the company’s competitive strategy.

A broad governance model also helps the organization to recognize cost, time, and technology benefits across the entire system, instead of requiring teams and business units to track and measure on their own—which can lead to imbalanced and improper resource allocations. A properly constructed and executed governance framework provides your company with a decision support system for managing IT projects successfully.

We’ve all heard the complaints: “We spend so much time on process, but I just don’t see any value here,” or “I’m not going to waste another dime on this black hole.” Your governance framework should be one of the core components of your organizational nervous system. These kinds of comments may indicate poor visibility into the process or—more likely—an immature (or nonexistent) governance model. As with any business activity, building without a clear purpose, defined roles, and some sense of what the end result should look like might just be a big black hole.

Value Creation

Many organizations have a difficult time evaluating the business value of their IT projects. Expanding SharePoint may fall under this description and raise questions from the business—whether adding new servers to improve performance (Do we really need to buy more hardware?), add new or improved functionality (Why do we need FAST? Doesn’t SharePoint already include search?), or customize SharePoint to meet specific business needs (Why are we building that in SharePoint when we can go buy another tool?). Historically, IT organizations cannot readily demonstrate the return on investment for these activities, which impacts executive buy-in as well as end-user support. Executives want to see that they are getting the biggest bang for their buck. End users want to know that the tools you provide will solve their business needs. You want a way to demonstrate value to both.

Value comes from three activities:

• By incremental improvements to the system over time
• By stretching your team, your processes, and your technology to meet customer demands.
• By responding to competitive demands

But it can be difficult to measure these values prior to development. While SharePoint offers a quick and relatively inexpensive way to build out a proof of concept (PoC) before going down the path of a full-blown development effort, you still need a way to identify the problem to be solved, organize and articulate the measurements, and then drive the review process.

There are some key components to successful governance:

• For one, it requires senior management leadership. They must understand and agree to the framework and drive accountability through all levels by following the recommendations that come out of the framework. Nothing will cause your process to lose legitimacy more quickly than the executive override.
• On that note, the process should be transparent so that everyone understands and follows the process and gets behind the end result.
• Following closely on the heels of transparency is a change management mechanism, which is the key to gaining end-user support. Give people a voice, and they are more likely to accept the changes that occur.
• Successful governance empowers decision making at lower levels, distributing accountability and control broadly to the teams that own the action—and are impacted by the decisions that are made.
• Finally, governance frameworks should be continually improved so that users don’t “game” the system and so gaps can be filled as they are identified. Transparency here is also essential—tweaks and changes to the process should also be visible and broadly communicated.

A successful governance framework helps show value by providing a framework through which these POCs can be tracked, measured, and evaluated to help demonstrate value. It provides a common denominator—a sandbox, if you will—for system planning.

Governance Applied

For the most part, governance has absolutely nothing to do with SharePoint. These are the same rules and procedures that should be in place for every enterprise application or system. Your SharePoint governance activities should be a reflection of your broader IT governance framework, allowing you to trace the path between SharePoint activities and your high-level corporate strategies.

Corporate governance influences many factors within IT, and a strong IT governance model will help your organization to effectively manage SharePoint, influencing/managing/enforcing the following:

• How SharePoint is used within the organization
• How SharePoint is architected
• How SharePoint infrastructure is deployed
• How SharePoint meets specific business requirements
• How the company invests in and prioritizes SharePoint requests

How you execute your governance strategy inside SharePoint depends entirely on the details surrounding your corporate and IT governance framework. The reality is that some of the decisions you make about how to manage SharePoint will be very difficult to execute based on certain technology limitations in the platform. Although these granular items are not the point of this introductory article, I will be addressing some of these things in future articles.

The goal of this article has been to help you understand the what about governance. My next installment will address the who.